I did not set out to become someone who reads forty books a year. It was not a goal I wrote down on a whiteboard or tracked in some productivity app. It just became the way I move through the world, the way some people run every morning or play guitar after dinner.. reading is the thing I do when I want to understand something, when I want to escape something, when I want to grow into something I am not yet. Three to four books a month, sometimes more, and I am always in the middle of four or five at the same time, because different books serve different needs on different days.
But if I am honest about where it started, I have to go back to elementary school.
When I was a kid, I was naturally drawn to being immersed outside of my current reality. To read was to almost be wherever you were reading, to leave Sterling Heights and end up inside someone else's world entirely. My mom had me reading Highlights magazine, and heck, even the encyclopedia was something I had to get through. She made me read the dictionary and memorize words by letter, which at the time felt like cruel and unusual punishment, but looking back it built a vocabulary I still carry. A tough pill to swallow, but one that worked.
Then one year there was this reading competition at school. It was a Jeopardy-style format where they would ask questions about the books you read, and there were twenty-one books slated for that year. I read all twenty-one in about a month. They were not hard-hitting books, but they were substantial for my age.. James and the Giant Peach, Charlotte's Web, that kind of thing. What I remember most is not the books themselves but the look in people's eyes, my classmates and my teachers, who did not realize I had read that much, who did not expect me to actually KNOW my books. I am a competitive person, and something about proving that I was not just reading but ABSORBING lit a fire that never went out.
Ever since then, I just naturally gravitated to reading.
Today my shelves look different than they did when I was ten. I read mostly nonfiction now.. self-improvement, business, biographies, marketing, anything that will help me grow as a person and as an entrepreneur. "Think and Grow Rich" was my first real foray into self-help, and it cracked something open in me, the idea that your thoughts could shape your outcomes, that there was a system behind success that you could study and apply. From there it was Anthony Robbins, then Stephen Covey, then Carol Dweck, then Cal Newport, and the list just keeps expanding.
I read biographies because I want to see inside the minds of people who built extraordinary things.. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett. I want to understand how they thought, what they sacrificed, where they stumbled. I read Robert Greene's "Mastery" and Alex Hormozi's marketing books because I run a business and I owe it to the people who depend on me to keep getting sharper. I read Brene Brown's "Daring Greatly" and Cheryl Strayed's "Wild" because growth is not just about strategy, it is about vulnerability and the courage to keep walking when the trail disappears.
And I reread. That part is important. When a book hits me in a way that changes how I think or act, I go back to it. Not once. Multiple times. Because a great book is not a destination you visit, it is a conversation that deepens every time you return to it.
People ask me how I find the time. I run two senior living homes in Troy, Michigan. I manage staff, handle operations, deal with families and licensing and all the things that come with keeping a care home running every single day. And still, forty books a year, give or take.
The honest answer is that reading is not something I find time for. It is something I MAKE time for, because it is not separate from the work, it IS the work. Every book I read makes me a better operator, a better leader, a better thinker. Reading gives me insight, perspectives, ways of thinking, strategies, even mentorship from people I will never meet in person. I can get into the mind of the writer, go on their journey, and learn lessons faster than if I had to go through every one of them myself. The nuggets of information, the shifts in perspective.. they compound over time in ways that are hard to measure but impossible to miss.
I honestly feel that my success, whatever that word means to me on any given day, is partly because I have read so many books. Life experience can come from living, yes, but it can also come from reading. Every book is borrowed experience, borrowed wisdom, borrowed courage.
When someone tells me they are not a reader, or that they do not have time, I understand. I do not judge that. But I think about it like this.. reading centers me. It gives me a lens through which I can see the world better. It is like having blurry vision your entire life, and all of a sudden you put on a pair of glasses and you can see the world so much more clearly. The colors are sharper. The edges are defined. The path forward, which used to be a blur of noise and urgency, becomes something you can actually navigate.
That is what forty books a year does for me. Not a number on a scoreboard. A way of seeing.
