Drinking Coffee With Gandhi

Reading is one of the best disciplines I know of to stay on your game and at your highest. Reading from a great book is really all about having a conversation with the author. And we become our conversations. Just think, tonight-by reading Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography, My Experiments with Truth, over a cup of coffee—you can get behind this great man's eyeballs and learn what made him tick. Want to hang out with Madonna tomorrow? Grab her book. Same for Jack Welch, Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, Salvador Dali or the Dalai Lama And reading a book by someone you respect allows some of their brilliance to rub off on you. The hand that puts down a great book will never be the same. As Oliver Wendell Holmes observed:

 "A mind once stretched by a new idea can never return to its original dimensions."

The old expression is true: "Knowing how to read and not reading is almost the same as not knowing how to read." Make the time to read something good each day. Fill your mind with big ideas and dazzling thoughts. Use books to flood your soul with hope and inspiration. And remember, if you want to lead, you really need to read. Oh, and if you like me-have the habit of buying more books than you can ever possibly read, don't feel guilty-you're building your library. And that's a beautiful thing!

“Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.”

― Epictetus, THE ART OF LIVING