How to Become a Millionaire This Year

 

There is at least one habit all successful people have in common.  They are all avid learners.  They are not necessarily traditionally educated, and they don’t necessarily read books to learn, but they all make learning a priority.

The easiest way to learn is to develop a habit of reading.  Read every day.  Read whenever you can: while standing in line, while on the toilet, while sitting on the train.  Better yet, set aside a dedicated time each day for reading (I recommend early morning and before bed).

And don’t just read, actively read.  Take notes, highlight passages, look for actionable items.  After you read, go do what you’ve learned.

Now consider a few numbers.  The average person reads about 300 words per minute.  The average book page has 250-300 words.  The average book is about 300 pages in length.  There are over 32 million books available on Amazon.  If all you did during your waking hours was read, it would take you over 35,000 years to read every book on Amazon, and I’m sure millions more books will be added in that time span.  So my point here is, you won’t be able to read even 0.01% of all the books out there, so what you choose to read really matters.

The average person spends 40 minutes on Facebook and 5 hours watching television each day, so setting aside 20 minutes each day to read is very reasonable.  If you read only 20 minutes per day, you will read about 24 books in a year.  It adds up!

Given everything I just told you, you can imagine that I expend quite a bit of effort deciding what to read.  I’ve compiled here a “path to success reading list” of the most influential books, according to hundreds of successful entrepreneurs and visionaries.  The data was compiled from various sources, but mostly from Entrepreneur on Fire.  Read these books, take action on everything you learn from them, and you will be on the path to a successful millionaire life:

1. Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill
2. 4-Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss
3. How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
4. The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield
5. Influence, by Robert B. Cialdini PhD
6. The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho
7. The ONE Thing, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan
8. Lean Startup, by Eric Ries
9. Rework, by Jason Fried
10. The E-myth Revisited, by Michael E. Gerber
11. Essentialism, by Greg McKeown
12. The Slight Edge, by Jeff Olson (not available on Kindle, but you can get the paperback for around $10)

Note that there are 12 books on this list, and there are 12 months in a year.  Read just one book each month (about 10 minutes of reading each day) and you will be done in a year.

If the cost of books is a concern, most of these books are classics that your local library should have.  If you buy all of these books electronically for Kindle from Amazon, it costs around $120.  However, that $120 will change your life several times over.  Trust me.

Disclosure: Links to Amazon.com are affiliate links