Are you running out of time?
“The trouble is, you think you have time. ”
Last summer I took a tour of the British Library in King's Cross, London.
The collection has over 150 million items, including 8 million stamps and over 4 million maps.
If you’re a budding philatelist or cartophile, I suggest you book yourself in pronto.
A further 3 million new items are added every year. Gulp!
Oh and to be a little more specific, existing items include things of modest significance like the Magna Carta, Beowulf, Leonardo da Vinci's Notebook and The Times first edition from 18th March 1788.
For fans of 60s rock music, there are even a number of original Beatles song manuscripts thrown in for good measure.
The most mind-blowing fact I found was that if you read 5 of their books a day, it would take you over 80,000 years to finish the entire collection.
Think about that for a second. That’s approximately 1,126 lifetimes.* (1,125 more than most of us get...reincarnation notwithstanding)
It made me think then and there that I should be much more considerate about the books I read.
Time to reduce the consumption of the trashy airport thriller and inject some more high-brow replacements.
The wonderful Tim Urban did some book number crunching on this and worked out that if he reads, on average, five books a year, he only has around 300 left.
If there were only a few hundred books you could read in your life, which books would you choose?
Here are some quick tips that might help you:
1) Map out the books you wish to read for the year ahead and set yourself a goal. I use the site Goodreads as it allows you to set a target and log the books you read against it. It’s ace.
2) Be ruthless. If something isn’t grabbing your attention, drop it immediately. Kick it to the kerb sister.
3) Look at book lists of people you admire for inspiration. Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates are just some examples out there.
*(based on the 71.4 years was the average life expectancy at birth of the global population in 2015, WHO statistics)
