Charlie Munger was the right hand man to Warren Buffet for decades and between them they created an investment company that in 2024 was valued at $877 billion. Before his death he made this comment about Warren’s reading habits – “All he does all day is sit on his ass reading.” Charlie estimated that Warren spent up to 8 hours a day looking like he was unbusy.
Reading has always been a joy for me. It started when I was a grade one student that had just learned to read. And I fell in love with the stories of pirates, adventurers and cowboys. There’s a bit of a theme there. Rebellion. Or is it an adventure? But that’s another story.
My favorite places at school were not only playing sports on the oval with my friends but also in quiet seclusion in the library. The librarian became my second mum.
But reading has always felt like a secret guilty pleasure. A few decades later, I too spend a lot of my days sitting on my ass and reading. I’ve not only fallen in love with the words on the page but creating words “for” a page.
Like Stephen King once said, “If you want to be a writer you need to read. There is no other way.”
In an information age and a knowledge economy there needs to be capturing of information, absorbing and inputting knowledge. Input first, output second. It’s needed and essential for producing ideas and the gaining of wisdom.
But we have a lot of information and it seems at the moment there is not a lot of wisdom. What did Charlie go on to say about developing wisdom? “In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time—none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads—and how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
My reading flows into my writing. I read and write to learn. To make sense of the world. To distill noise into sense. To actualize the ephemeral into black and white. Pen on the page. So I can share what I discover with the world.
That passion for reading transcended into a blog that had 5 million readers a year, writing for the New York Times and speaking in dozens of countries all around the world. Reading, writing and sharing created and manifested my own world of adventure.
Today I still feel a bit guilty sitting on a soft sofa consuming page after page sipping black coffe and taking notes. But since I now know it worked well for Warren Buffet and Berkshire Hathaway, I have moved on from what felt like a secret guilty pleasure and a quiet sin not to be manic and productive in clinical busyness and serve the corporate masters mode to realizing it is what’s needed to unleash the power of what lies within.
How much reading are you doing?
