The Richest People In The World Have 5 Books In Common (2024)

FAQs

How many books do billionaires read in the world? ›

According to Pew Research, the typical American reads about four books a year. Compare that to the reading habits of American billionaire Bill Gates. He doesn't simply outpace an average reader, he's on an entirely different level; he powers through an astounding 50 books each year. That's about one book per week.

America's richest people are mostly self-made. Their wealth comes from the businesses they founded and helped build. Changes in the market value of their businesses can explain nearly all the shifts and volatility in the 10 wealthiest billionaires' net worth.

But they didn't drop out of school because they didn't like books. Although they left school, they continued to learn through books. According to Bill Gates, “I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.”

Bezos never lost his love for books. He became a voracious reader. and even started a book club for leaders at Amazon. Here are just a few of the innovations Bezos.

Bill Gates Reading Habits

Gates won't begin reading a book that he won't finish. According to his wife Melinda, Bill reads approximately 150 pages per hour, a staggering speed, especially given that he takes in and understands the vast majority of what he reads (his comprehension level is off the charts).

Through the 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten program, Haleema Arana got the idea to start counting the number of books Daliyah read. She was about 3 years old at the time, and had likely already read about 1,000 books with the help of her mother.

Ninety percent of all millionaires become so through owning real estate.

The study found that rich individuals, i.e. people with a net worth of more than one million euros, had a distinctive personality profile when compared to the non-rich. Overall, they tended to be more risk-tolerant, open, extraverted and conscientious than the rest of the group.

But there are a small minority of billionaires who started from genuine poverty. Oprah Winfrey grew up in a home without power or running water, and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz grew up in government-subsidized housing.

Some examples of successful people who practice the 5-hour rule include Bill Gates, who reads for one hour every night, and Warren Buffett, who spends up to six hours a day reading. Both Gates and Buffett credit their commitment to continuous learning as a key factor in their success.

How much does Mark Zuckerberg read? ›

Mark Zuckerberg tries to read a book a week “with an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies”. Mark Cuban reads three hours every day, and he says that this worked wonders at the start of his career.

From Warren Buffett to Elon Musk and Sara Blakely to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, life-long learners make reading a daily habit. A Harvard study found that top-performing CEOs (and most billionaires) read more books than average, up to four books a month.

Mark Zuckerberg

In 2015, the Facebook CEO vowed to read one book every other week "with an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies," he wrote in a Facebook post. "Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today," he wrote.

Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe, and The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen are a few books that are consistently considered to be some of Steve Jobs' favorite books.

Bill Gates reads all the time — about 50 books a year — and is an advocate for its many benefits. So how does the billionaire book lover remember what he reads? The trick, he says, is context. “If you read enough, there's a similarity between things that make it easy, because this thing is like this other thing.

In fact, the average number of books read by a CEO is 60 books per year, or five books each month. “What I know for sure is that reading opens you up,” says Oprah, “It exposes you and gives you access to anything your mind can hold. What I love most about reading—It gives you the ability to reach higher ground.”

Becoming rich isn't about luck, it's a lot of hard work and there's one thing these millionaires all have in common - they're avid readers. On average, a millionaire reads 4 books a month which totals to an average of 52 books a year, helping them grow and build their empire.

Chandra Mohan Jain (better known as Acharya Rajneesh or simply OSHO), a Indian spiritual leader active in 1970's and 80's, claimed to have read over 150,000 books. By modest estimates, if we assume he read continuously for 48 years (he lived for 58), it comes out to be 3,000 books a year.

According to a research done by Thomas Carley in which he shows that 85% of self made Millionaires read two or more books per month on an average. What is it in the reading habit that every successful person adopts this.