The short answer
I would rather someone read five books ten times than fifty books once. Read biographies of operators, one accounting text until the numbers are instinctive, and something outside business each year to keep the judgment wide.
In full
Reading volume is a vanity metric. Applied reading is the only kind that changes a balance sheet.
Biographies of people who actually built things teach pattern recognition better than any framework. You see the decision before you see the outcome.
One serious book on financial statements, read until the numbers speak plainly, is worth a shelf of strategy titles.
Then read something well outside your field annually. Every original business idea I have had came from an analogy borrowed elsewhere.
From experience
The same short book on operations sat on my desk for eleven years, marked up until the spine failed. I did not need the twelfth book. I needed the eleventh reading of the one that worked.
Common mistake
Reading for the feeling of progress. If a book has not changed one behavior within a month, it was entertainment.
Do this next
- Step 1
Choose one book directly relevant to your current constraint.
- Step 2
Extract three actions and schedule them before starting anything else.
- Step 3
Re-read the same book in ninety days and note what you missed.
Questions
- Audio or print?
- Whichever one you actually finish and mark up. Retention comes from the notes, not the format.
- How much should you read?
- Enough to keep one experiment running at all times. More than that is procrastination.
By Robert T Fletcher