Seth Godin claimed in his manifesto on education that “Among Americans, the typical high school graduate reads no more than one book a year for fun, and a huge portion of the population reads zero. No books! For the rest of their lives, for 80 years, bookless.”
I’m not sure where he got his data, but consider the similarity between his claim and the following statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Economic News Release on June 19, 2019:
“Individuals age 75 and over averaged 48 minutes of reading per day whereas individuals ages 15 to 54 read on average 10 minutes or less per day.”
The Bureau’s same research indicated that individuals aged 15 to 19 spent 5.79 total hours per day in leisure activities. Of those leisure hours, only .12 were spent reading. That means the average high school student spent about 7 minutes of their daily leisure time reading—just seven minutes!
To provide some context, those same individuals spent 3.26 hours per day watching TV or playing computer games.
And surprisingly, leisure-time reading doesn’t increase in college-aged students, it actually goes down slightly to .11 or just about 6 and a half minutes per day for 20 to 24-year-olds.
In another study, 37% of Americans without a high school diploma had not read a single book in the last year, and the same went for 7% of college graduates.
There are a bunch of possible inferences that could be made from these numbers, but here’s one way to think about it. To be an above-average reader in America, one only needs to read more than 10 minutes per day in their youth with a commitment to increase the time they spend reading as they age until one is reading for an hour each day.
Why Reading Is So Important
It’s no secret that reading is one of the key habits successful people share. As President Trueman noted, “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” Reading is essential to the life of the mind and to the development of one’s knowledge base and understanding. And when reading the right books, reading is the essential ingredient for developing one’s moral imagination.
This excerpt from Business Insider is an example of what I mean, revealing what it calls “the extreme reading habits of … billionaire entrepreneurs:”
• Warren Buffett spends five to six hours a day reading five newspapers and 500 pages of corporate reports.
• Bill Gates reads 50 books a year.
• Mark Zuckerberg reads at least one book every two weeks.
• Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day, according to his brother.
• Mark Cuban reads for more than three hours every day.
• Arthur Blank, a co-founder of Home Depot, reads two hours a day.
• Billionaire entrepreneur David Rubenstein reads six books a week.
• Dan Gilbert, the self-made billionaire who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, reads for one to two hours a day.
An Experiment
So, here’s an experiment.
What would happen if you found a comfortable quiet spot where you won’t be interrupted and set a timer for 25 minutes and just read? Using a pencil to mark things as you read and making annotations in the margins, read actively. When the timer goes off, put the book aside and resume your regular activities. Now what if you did that every day for one week, seven days? You will have invested nearly 3 hours of your leisure time to reading. In 52 weeks, that’s approximately 152 hours.
Let’s just say you complete a book for every ten hours of reading. Of course, it will be more or less depending on the book’s size and genre, but as a sort of gauge to go by, 10 hours to complete a 200-page book is generous. That would amount to reading 15 books in a year.
Unless you’re already reading more than 15 books per year, you will likely recognize the potential this experiment has to transform a person’s reading life; unfortunately, only a few will attempt the experiment, and fewer will actually complete it. But at least it’s out there to think about.