Reserve 2-3 hours of your day just for reading. Read (auto-)biographies of great men. Read books. Read magazines. Read scientific papers. Read online articles. Read on your smartphone. Read whenever you’ve got some spare time on your hands and don’t know what to do with it.

I currently work part-time in a construction working site. I start work at 7:30am in the morning. I leave the house at 6:45am. When do I get up? Not after 5am. Why? So that I can spend some of my sharpest hours in the day reading – that’s how important it is to me.

Most days I guess I read for about 3 hours. Some days it’s 5 hours. Some days it’s 10 minutes. But it rarely happens that a day passes by and I didn’t read at least a couple of paragraphs.

You can tell: I am 100% sold on the benefits of reading. Now let me convince YOU. Here are 7 reasons why reading is one of the best things you could ever do. Let's get to it...

(BY THE WAY: When I talk about reading I don’t talk about the geeky “it’s such a fun activity” type of reading. There’s a shitload of activities that are a LOT more fun. I’m talking about reading to gain knowledge and get access to ideas and insights of great men and women… I talk about reading as a personal growth tool, not a means to get pleasure or have fun.)

Why I Started Reading

Reading books is an awesome tool for learning, it changed my life and will probably change yours too. If you read my previous post, you’ll know that I started reading at the bus on my way to work. What I didn’t say in that post is why I started this habit, what motivated me to schedule time in my daily routine just for books. And the reason is quite simple: I wanted to become a better programmer.

I had just been transferred to the software development team at the company I was working at and I felt in disadvantage with respect to my teammates. This was because they all had degrees in Software Engineering while I had majored in Electrical Engineering. I thought that this sole fact meant that I would never be as good as them. That was until I heard a colleague I really admired as a programmer (I still do, in case he’s reading this) say that he wasn’t always good at making software. At some point in his life he simply started reading books in order to improve his programming skills.

So I set up to do the same. I searched for the best books on “how to program well”. Once I had defined which books I wanted to read (in case you’re curious, they were The Pragmatic Programmer and Clean Code) I needed to find time to read them. And that’s made me start the experiment of reading in the bus.

In retrospective, it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Not only did I become a better programmer (eventually), but soon enough I was reading about other topics that interested me. I discovered books about topics such as entrepreneurship, time management and happiness. In this still ongoing process, I have encountered such jewels as: Delivering Happiness, an awesome book about building a company and a life that you love and The Obstacle is The Way, a guide that helps you appreciate and learn from everything that happens to you, no matter how “good” or “bad” you think it is.

The Benefits of Reading

So why is reading so great? My favorite quote that describes the positive consequences of reading comes from the fantasy book series “Song of Ice And Fire” later turned into the HBO series “Game of Thrones”:

“My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer and I have my mind… and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone if it is to keep its edge.” — Tyrion Lannister

But how do we explain this process? What makes reading a great way of honing our minds? I believe that one of the main reasons is that it gives us unrestrained access to the author’s mind: books are a great way of sharing not only knowledge but a thought process.

We rarely realize this, but after reading book you’ll start thinking like the book’s author. I have experienced this more than once, while rereading books after many years had passed since the first time I read them. Sometimes I would stumble upon ideas that I had absorbed entirely into my mindset, completely forgetting that I had read them in that particular book.

Reading Gives You Tools to Solve Your Problems

Modern life is full of “problems”.

Maybe you have trouble falling asleep at night. Or you are going through a depression. Or your marriage sucks. Or you’re suffering from low self-esteem. Or you’re going through a tough break-up. Or maybe you’re overweight. Or you’re underweight.

The PROBLEM is: You don’t know how to solve most of your problems.

Why? Because you lack the right tools, the right knowledge and know-how.

And this is where books come in – they give you the necessary tools and knowledge to solve almost any problem.

Let me give you an example from my own life:

How reading helped me cure my insomnia for good: I’ve been suffering from insomnia until about a year ago. I wasn’t a chronic insomniac, but there were a lot of nights of just lying in bed for hours and hours and not being able to fall asleep – my overactive mind wouldn’t let me.

Then I started reading lots of articles about curing insomnia and sleep optimization in general. I learned everything I could about the causes of insomnia and how to fall asleep faster. I started using the tricks, started seeing some results, and just kept on tweaking and tweaking. Today, I can fall asleep on demand, every night, within 5-10 minutes.

Reading gave me the tools to solve this problem.

And it’s been well worth it. My health is better. I’m feeling less stressed. I can easily get adequate amounts of sleep. I can get up early when I want to. I save a lot of time and energy. Frankly, getting rid of this problem was a big upgrade for me.

(Note: You find a lot of the tools Jonas and I use to fall asleep faster on this very blog. You can get access to these tools through… *drumroll* reading.)