Microsoft Word who will cry when u die doc

28. 
Always Carry a Book with You 
According to U.S. News & World Report, over the course of your lifetime, you will spend eight months opening 
junk mail, two years unsuccessfully returning phone calls and five years standing in line. Given this startling 
fact, one of the simplest yet smartest time management strategies you can follow is to never go anywhere 
without a book under your arm. While others waiting in line are complaining, you will be growing and feeding 
your mind a rich diet of ideas found in great books. 
“So long as you live, keep learning how to live,” noted the Roman philosopher Seneca. Yet most people never 
read more than a handful of books after they complete their formal schooling. In these times of rapid change, 
ideas are the commodity of success. All it takes is one idea from the right book to reshape your character or to 
transform your relationships or to revolutionize your life. A good book can change the way you love as the 
philosopher Henry David Thoreau observed in Walden.” There are probably words addressed to our condition 
exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to 
out lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era of his 
life from the reading of a book. The book exists fro us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal 
new ones.” 
How high you will rise in your life will be determined not by how hard you work but by how well you think. As 
I say in my leadership speeches, “The greatest leaders in this new economy will be the greatest thinkers.” And 
the person you will be five years from now will come down to two primary influences: the people you associate 
with and the books you read. I often joke with my seminar audiences that I play “Cinderella Tennis”: I try hard 
but I never quite make it to the ball. Yet when I play tennis with someone better than I am, something almost 
magical happens to my game. I make shots that I have never made before, gracefully floating through the air 
with an ease that would make even the best player blush. Reading good books creates much the same 
phenomenon. When you expose your mind to the thoughts of the greatest people who have walked this planet 
before you, your game improves, the depth of your thinking expands and you rise to a whole new level of 
wisdom. 
Deep reading allows you to connect with the world’s most creative, intelligent and inspiring people, twenty – 
four hours a day. Aristotle, Emerson, Seneca, Gandhi, Thoreau, Dorothea Brande, and  many of the wisest 
women and men who grace our planet today are just waiting to share their knowledge with you through their 
books. Why wouldn’t you seize such an opportunity as often as you could? If you have not read today, you have 
not really lived today. And knowing how to read but failing to do so puts you in exactly the same position as the 
person who cannot read but wants to. 
 

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