My Childhood Friends
I have been a voracious reader of books from when I was young. I grew up with the Famous Five and Hardy Boys, matured with Nancy Drew and Perry Mason, spent court rooms with John Grisham, flirted with Sidney Sheldon and explored unknown worlds with Michael Crichton. Now I read mostly non fiction.
My Mentors
Through Books, I have learnt from coaches like Anthony Robbins, Zig ziglar, Business Tycoons like Sir Richard Branson, Akio Morito thought leaders like Dr.Atul Gawande, Tim Ferris, Journalists like Malcom Gladwell, Charles Duhigg and many more.
One idea that kept haunting me through many of these self development literature is that “Leaders are Readers.”I always thought ‘wow, that’s a nice thought’ and nothing more about it.
Who is Elon Musk?
It was a video on Elon Musk by Bloomberg that blew me away and made me realise the depth of this simple yet profound statement. I didn’t know much about Elon Musk before I watched the video. I had occasionally seen questions in Quora like ‘What is it like to work with Elon Musk’ , ‘Why did Elon Musk do that ..etc’. A quasi hero worship from a site like quora is something uncommon and I decided to look him up which is when I stumbled upon this video.
For those who were as knowledgeable as I was before, Elon Musk is a billionaire Entrepreneur who is redefining solar power, Electric Cars and space all at once.
Elon Musk and Rocket Science
Elon Musk’s obsession with books was obvious from a very young age. By 12 he learnt computer programming through books. He reportedly read every single book in the library. While talking about his company Spacex the journalist asked him, ‘So how did you learn, rocket science?’ for which Elon Musk replied
“I read some Books”
What ???????!!!!!!!!!!
I had to pause the video and replay to be sure !!
Throughout my life, we had always said..”C’mon ..its not rocket science…and here it was indeed rocket science…”
Learning from the Leaders
A Book is the simplest and cheapest way you can get into the brains of thought leaders. Even limited seat workshops of some of these leaders run into several lakh rupees and get sold out immediately. It is the only way to spend time with dead leaders like Gandhi, Einstein and Aristotle.
What you can learn from Books?
It’not just Elon Musk, Tech Entrepreneur and the richest person in the world, Bill Gates, Wall street Billionaire Investor Warren Buffett have been vocal about their love for reading.
From computer programming to Rocket Science, Investing to changing our lives and the world…what can we not learn..if we put our mind into it !!
If a poor South African immigrant afraid of the dark and was constantly bullied in school, could build products as varied as online payments to Electric Cars and Space shuttles, what is not possible for us to do ?
Dream.Learn.Do.Be.
Be like Elon musk 🙂
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Not a lot is understood about books. The visual nature of TV and Youtube, make them appeal more to our senses. But books can help us enter the mind of the author. As your article points out, the most successful read and learn a lot and regularly apply what they read.
True. Visual media is looking at it from someone else’s eye. Books have this magical ability to let you do the imagination and see in your own eye of imagination.