The One Important Lesson I Learned From Anthony Robbins

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I have always been a lover of books. My mum used to tell me that I never asked for toys, as a kid, whenever she was going shopping. She said I was always asking her to buy me books. I suspect she was exaggerating, trying to make me feel like a superhero of sorts. But still, I remember some instances when I made such requests as a kid.

The thing is, as much as I liked books, I wasn't the voracious reader that I am now. (Or perhaps I’ve been able to successfully fool myself into believing I am a voracious reader now). I only started reading a lot in my first year in the university, after hearing about Anthony Robbins' story. I knew that reading was good, but I never quite understood the value of knowledge until I heard the story.

Someone told me that Anthony Robbins read 700 books, but but I didn’t bother to ask how long it took him to do so. (He didn’t go to college, and he worked as a janitor, but is not one of the richest motivational speakers in the world, so his story caught my attention.) It was a huge thing for me to hear that someone read 700 books. So I set out to do the same. In my naivete and youthful exuberance, I planned to read 700 books throughout my four years in the university. As life would have it, I didn't achieve that goal. I didn't even come close. But what I did do was that I read at least 100 books in my four years in the university. (I tried small sha). Most of the book titles I can't remember. The people who knew me well in school knew I was always with a book. From my first year to the last in the university, my desire was to improve myself through reading.

Five years after the day I heard Anthony Robbins' story, I'm still burning with that fire. I started 2015 with the goal of reading at least 40 books. I'm just three books shy of achieving that goal. It feels good. It feels really good. Not because of all the books I have read, but because I set a goal and I am able to achieve and surpass it. I hope 2016 will be better.

On Sunday afternoon, while looking for inspiration to write this article, I came across on of Mr. Robbins' interview on Success.com. It finally let me know how much time it took him to read those books. Here's what he said:

“I had no role models. I did love reading. I started reading Emerson’s essays, [James Allen’s] As a Man Thinketh, Viktor Frankl’s Man's Search for Meaning—they rocked my world. They made my problems look like nothing. I get emotional thinking about it today, all these years later. It made me believe that, a) anything can be changed and made better, and if you couldn’t change the physical circumstance you could still change your experience of it; and b) it made me think that reading could transport me to another world where I could find the answers. So I took a speed-reading course and read 700 books in seven years—all on psychology, physiology, anything that could make a difference in life.”

So, that's 100 books a year. It's a lot of books, but it can be done. The problem, however, and the question I have is: how many of those books actually took root in his life? I'll probably never know the answer but I'm grateful for the lesson he taught me: that reading a lot can get you very far in life. But I also understand that application of knowledge matters much more than the knowledge itself.

Or, what do you think?