Q’s from Twitter: The Advice I Give My Daughter About Purpose, Books I Re-Read, Procrastination Decoded & More

I read somewhere that Bill Gates won’t stop reading a book. Even if it’s bad. He has to finish it.

Bill Gates is stupid.

I quit books all the time.

What if Bill Gates dies while forcing himself to read a book he doesn’t want to read? And then people find his dead body, in his favorite reading chair with “Trump and The Jews” on his lap.

That will go in his obituary!

“Bill Gates founder of Microsoft and co-founder of The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation died Thursday while peacefully reading ‘Trump and The Jews.’”

You can’t defend or deny when you’re dead. You can’t say “Oh, no, I was only reading that because I have this rule that I can’t stop reading a book I started reading.”

I don’t care if I’m 500 pages in. If I don’t like something, I’ll stop.

It’s that simple.

Someone asked me on Twitter “How do I find more time to read?”

This is one of the ways: quit what you hate.

I did a podcast with Steve Cohen about this. We’re doing this every week now. Different topics. And sometimes we’ll take your questions.

This time we talked about reading. But I also told Steve the advice I gave my daughter when she asked me “how to find her purpose in life.”

You can listen to it here:

And send us questions here:

@jaltucher on Twitter

Or

@altucher on Instagram.

I’ll tell you one other thing about my reading habits.

I once asked my friend Stephen Dubner, who wrote “Freakonomics”, “What percentage of a book do you actually remember?”

His answer surprised me: “less than 1%”

So if I’m only going to remember 1% of a book, I want it to be 1% of the best books.

Here’s one:

I re-read “The Old Man and the Sea” at least once a year. And maybe someday, I’ll get to die with it on my lap.