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Warren Buffett picks the next book and starts it. The average business owner picks the next book and adds it to a list of 47.
Think Big Minute #23
Brian Tracy reads 3 hours a day at 80 and runs his own publishing house. Most business owners have 47 unread books on their nightstand and a Kindle full of samples they’ll get to “soon.” Guess which one is actually getting smarter.
Same hours in the day. Same access to the same books. Different relationship to the list.
Your “to read” list is a museum of intentions.
Either read the book this week or delete it.
Look at how the people who actually compound by reading run it.
Warren Buffett reads 5 to 6 hours a day and has since the 1950s. He doesn’t keep a wishlist. He picks the next book and starts it.
Charlie Munger said he constantly walked around with a book under his arm because waiting in line, sitting on a plane, or eating alone was reading time. No queue. Just the next book.
Naval Ravikant has said publicly he abandons books 50 pages in if they aren’t earning the time. No guilt. No saved for later list.
Bill Gates does an annual think week where he reads 15 books in 7 days. He doesn’t queue them up for “someday.” He blocks the time and consumes the stack.
Ryan Holiday writes books while running a bookstore in Texas. He’s said the most important question with any book is “am I reading it now or am I never reading it?” There is no third category.
Different industries. Same pattern.
The people who actually get smarter by reading don’t keep growing wishlists.
They read the book or they kill the entry.
Now look at the average business owner’s reading setup.
47 books on the nightstand. A Kindle full of samples. A “to read” doc with 130 titles. A Goodreads “want to read” shelf with 200 entries from 6 years ago. 4 audiobooks half finished in Audible.
Zero of those count as reading.
What that pile actually represents is intent, not action. The list is a substitute for the work, not a runway to it.
Most business owners feel productive every time they add a book to it. They get a small dopamine hit from the act of saving the title. The brain logs “I’m someone who reads serious books.”
Then 90% of the list never gets read.
The list itself is the procrastination.
I caught myself running this exact game.
I had a backlog of biographies, business books, and operator memoirs sitting in my queue for months. I’d add a new one every couple of weeks. I’d tell myself I was building a smart pipeline.
I wasn’t reading them.
The list was making me feel like a serious reader without ever requiring me to actually open one.
Once I noticed it I cut it. Hard. Anything I hadn’t started in 30 days got deleted off the list. Anything new either started this week or didn’t make it on the list at all.
My read count went up immediately.
Not because I was trying harder.
Because I stopped treating the list as the work.
Here’s why business owners specifically are bad at this.
Most of us came up using project management tools. Trello. Asana. Notion. ClickUp. Disciplines where capturing the task is half the battle.
That wires your brain to think the list is the action.
For business tasks it sort of is. The list helps you not forget. The list helps you sequence. The list is a tool that compounds.
For reading, the list is the opposite.
Reading is binary. You read the book or you don’t. The “saved for later” state is identical to “never going to read” in 95% of cases. The list creates an illusion that the books are queued up to compound your knowledge when in reality they’re just digital clutter.
Completely different game. The tool that runs your business actively hurts your reading life.
The unread book on your nightstand is not pre knowledge waiting to be unlocked.
It’s a piece of furniture.
Read the book this week or delete it.
Living lists kill more time than they save.
…Think Big.
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