When you read a book a day you feel like your brain is on fire. You can connect ideas faster, discover new opportunities, and view the world in a completely new light.

Investing in a six-dollar paperback will give you amazing returns.

Reading a book a day isn’t something that you can probably do for a lengthy duration of time (like 365 consecutive days), but it’s doable in short concentrated bursts.

If you’ve got a week or two of downtime, tear through some titles. Knocking out seven books in seven days is going to give you a lot of information that you can use.

For this experiment I read 11 books in 11 days. Some were nonfiction. Some were cheesy horror novels. One was a play. All of them gave me new ideas and insights.

Below is my video discussing how you can read a book a day. The rest of this article is about the benefits of reading lots of books in a very short time.

How To Read A Book A Day Like Tai Lopez (Video And Show Notes)

Show Notes:

• If you want to read a book a day, you’re going to need to pick short titles
• Most books will only teach you one or two things, but these lessons can be priceless
• If you want to learn how to keep an audience engaged, you need to start reading fiction
• Goodwill sells books for mere pennies
• Crosswords and puzzle books can improve your vocabulary
• Kindle Unlimited costs $9.99 a month and lets you download thousands of books, it’s an amazing value
• Between libraries and the Internet, reading is free

Quick Corrections:

• When discussing “X” I meant to say “variable” not “integer”
• Copyblogger, not CopyHour, is the website with 16 free books

Three Benefits From Reading A Book A Day

You’re probably too busy to read a book every single day for your entire life. Additionally, I won’t recommend doing this exercise all too often because you don’t absorb as much information as when you sit down and take your time with what you’re reading.

That said, knocking out a book a day can be a great way to give yourself a nice kick in the pants. You’re going to get a temporary knowledge boost, where you’ve got all kinds of ideas swirling around in your head, and you can use this to go out and take action.

In addition to this, you’re going to get some other cool advantages. Like the following:

1. You Become More Intelligent

The average person reads six books a year. Ask the average women what she does in her free time you’ll hear about reality TV and Instagram. Then ask the average man how his tie is spent. He’ll tell you about beer and video games.

Simply put, most people don’t read or learn anything new. If you read a book a day for two weeks, and then never picked up another book all year, you’d still be miles ahead of general population.

You can even pick up a children’s book on some complex subject, like science or math, and still learn a lot. When you don’t have a specific skill or concept you want to study, read through a broad range of topics. That’s what I did, and in a few moments you’ll see quite a few of the new things I learned.

2. You Can Make A Lot Of Money

I bought a book titled The Six-Figure Erotica Author. I liked the book and decided to follow its advice on self-publishing. Within a month I had made several hundred dollars in passive income. And shortly after that I was generating over a thousand dollars a month. All from an afternoon of reading.

When you read one book a day for two weeks, you’ll have been exposed to at least a dozen new ideas. And if you took one thing from each book and applied it to your life, you’d see major changes.

For example, I read a book that suggested writing “When you            ” instead of “If you            ” in your sales letters. I was a little change but something I started doing. Almost overnight I saw my earnings increase. This tiny took seconds to implement but it yielded huge results.

P.S. If you’re wondering about the science behind saying “When you ” instead of “If you ,” “When” makes you sound more confident and makes your product sound like it’s guaranteed to work. “If” comes across as more wishy-washy.

3. You Never Run Out Of Things To Say

When you read several books in a matter of days you’ll have a lot to talk about. Feel free to laugh at me, but in college I read a lot. On dates, whenever the conversation started to die down, I’d end up rattling off some trivia I read or something like that. It kept the conversation from falling into awkward silence. .

You can also use what you’ve learned to meet new people and make business connections. At the very least, you’ll end up having some interesting conversations. The next time you visit the doctor, read up on medical information beforehand. The conversation you have at your check up will be completely different from the one normal people have.

If you’re a writer, never running out of things to say gives you unlimited content to publish. I run multiple websites, two Twitter accounts, a self-publishing company, and (more recently) a newsletter. Despite this, I’m never scratching my head for things to write about.

If you read a lot you’ll never have “writer’s block.” There’s always something stewing in your brain, aching to get out and on to the page.

The 11 Books I Read In 11 Days

Here are the 11 books that I read in 11 days. None of them were incredibly lengthy, the average age count was around 150, but I gained quite a bit from each title:

1. A Slice Of Pi (Amazon)
2. Launch (Danger & Play)
3. Castaways (Amazon)
4. Scientific Advertising (Free)
5. How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling (Amazon)
6. An Enemy of the People (Amazon)
7. Writers On Writing Vol.1 (Amazon)
8. Selling from the Trenches (Amazon)
9. Convict Conditioning (Amazon)
10. Negotiation Secrets of the World’s Most Persuasive Men and Women (Amazon)
11. All Marketers Are Liars (Amazon)

11 Things I Learned In 11 Days

(I learned more about math from reading A Slice Of Pi than I did in all of high school)

Rather than just telling you what books I read, I’ve decided to include a short list of things I learned:

1. (°C ÷ 5 x 9) + 32 = °F – Converts Celsius into Fahrenheit (useful for Americans who plan on traveling abroad).
2. As a rough estimate, every one person on your email marketing list will earn you about $12 per year – A 100 person list will generate roughly $1,200.
3. The goofiest story or premise can still be engrossing if you’re enthusiastic while explaining it – A cheesy plot (mutant cannibals attacking a reality TV show) is made entertaining simply from the author’s own enthusiasm.
4. Being a mediocre salesman is not as harmful as representing a mediocre brand – You can’t polish a turd.
5. Find out what your customer needs and focus on meeting them – Nobody will ever buy something if they don’t think it’s beneficial.
6. Conflict is engrossing – People love to watch a battle unfold, if you can’t provide them with some sort of conflict you’ll lose they’re interest (This is not what the book is about, but it is what I thought about while reading it).
7. Short sentences are tense, long sentences make us relax – If you want to improve your writing and make your work sound more exciting, use short sentences.
8. Watching Bevis & Butthead will make you a better copywriter – If you want to get your message out to as many people as possible, you need to be accessible. Write so that everyone can understand you, include references your audience will enjoy, and get your point across in a clear manner.
9. You can build muscle doing body-weight exercises – I started doing the “basic” routine laid out in this book (in addition to lifting weights). I seem to have gotten a little bigger already.
10. If you want to save money, wince when someone tells you the price for whatever you’re buying – Expressing physical pain over a bill (silly as it sounds) will usually earn you a discount.
11. Your actions tell a story about who you are and what you do – People are smart, they can spot a scam artist and a faker from a mile away If you want to build a business you’ve got to build trust.

Some of these lessons might sound a tad bit generic, but I’ve put them into use and seen some cool results. To build more trust, I started including a lot of pictures and screenshots with articles I wrote. This lead to a noticeable bump in traffic and people ordering things.

In my copywriting business, I decided to tackle a not-particularly-exciting-project with insane enthusiasm. I ended up getting hired for three more sales letters as a result.

And lastly, I focused on the idea of meeting customer needs and highlighting product benefits. This has led to me building a profitable website in a very short amount of time.

Closing Thoughts

When you’re stuck in a rut or just want to take yourself to the next level, reading a book a day can help. You don’t have to do this for months or years to see the results either.

A week of intense reading can give you the knowledge, and the tool set, to go out and make major changes to your life.

Most people live in quiet suffering their entire lives. They’ll dream of doing something incredible but never actually take the steps to achieving their goals. It’s why 25% of people abandon their New Year’s resolutions within seven days of making them. While there are numerous reasons for this, I suspect their negative mentality to be one of the leading culprits. Folks want something, but they’re so hard on themselves that working towards the end-goal becomes unbearable.

Even “alpha male manly men” have poor mindsets. They throw hissy-fits about things they read on Twitter, obsess over “economic decline,” and envy any man more successful than them. Most men’s blogs read like a feminist parody, poking fun at the fragile male ego.

But what about people who have made it? Is mindset important to them?

A lot of successful people, at least the ones I’ve met, are well acquainted with those “cheesy mindset books” that everyone else is too cool to read. Hang out with success for an afternoon and you’ll probably hear references to Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, or Tony Robbins. I’ve had lunch with self-made millionaires who still get excited to talk about Think and Grow Rich.

To most successful people, the proper mindset plays a huge role in their daily life. In most ultra-competitive events (like business, sports, and dating) the weak and the wishy-washy are killed off almost instantly. It takes a certain mentality to be number one, something that the average person doesn’t have.

Since mindset is so important, it has always baffled me that many people gloss over its significance. You’ll see guys who want to be rich, yet talk themselves out of every starting a company. Or grown men want to get better at dating, but spend all their time complaining that it’s impossible to attract women.

In reality the only thing holding these people back is themselves. It’s impossible to become a winner if you constantly think like a loser.

Gorilla Mindset, by Mike Cernovich, sets out to fix this problem.

Warning: Gorilla Mindset Is Not Pie-In-The-Sky Theory

I know some of you may groan about self-help books. In recent years the genre’s been clogged with sh*t titles. Books about chanting empowering phrases, or memorizing silly acronyms seem to have dominated the market. These are products with authors who’ve never actually accomplished anything, yet want to tell you how to be a winner. They’re old information rehashed and sold under some trendy new buzzword. And they never contain any actionable material for you benefit from. Gorilla Mindset is not one of these books.

If you are looking for “one weird trick” that promises to magically solve all life’s problems, move along. Instead of being fed page after page of theory, you’re given step-by-step instructions on how to improve your life. Over the book’s 127 pages you’re given the tools to control your emotions, reclaim your attention span, develop a “steel trap” mind, improve your health, and protect your finances. Plus plenty more (there are even some cool guest interviews in several chapters).

As I mentioned earlier, this is not a theory book. Every chapter contains activities and challenges for you to participate in. From word association exercises that get your brain fired up to visualization worksheets.

Does Any Of This Actually Work?

We can talk about spiffy worksheets and cool content all day. But we both know those things are just icing on the cake. You can glue googly eyes on a turd and name it Hidalgo, but at the end of the day it’s still just a turd.

You want to know if this book works.

Can it deliver? Does it live up to the hype? Is it really life changing?

While the book isn’t a magic cure-all and can’t fix all your problems for you, the advice it contains actually works. How do I know? Because I’ve been using it for years. And in that time I’ve quit my job, traveled around the world, made new friends, and had a lot of fun.

Mike has been writing about Gorilla Mindset (though he didn’t originally call it that) for years. The first time I encountered it was in an article of his entitled Bigger Goals Require Higher Standards (link).

I applied the principles to my goal of becoming a freelance writer. Within two months I had a guest chapter published in the book How To Survive Living Abroad (Amazon). Two months after that I quit my regular job to focus solely on writing. And since then I’ve used those same mindset strategies to publish multiple bestsellers, travel the world, and (more recently) relocate to major international city.

To make a long story short, Gorilla Mindset works. If you’re willing to implement the advice you will see results.

Lastly, I liked the book so much that I’m not even bothering to earn an affiliate commission from it. This isn’t a sales pitch and I’m not pumping you up to buy something. I honestly believe that Gorilla Mindset contains incredibly powerful information that can change your life.

Click Here To Find Out More

Writing erotica is the fastest and easiest way to make money online. If you put out three or four short stories a month you could easily earn $800 to $1,000. More serious authors who are releasing 10 or so stories a month are pulling anywhere from $7,000 to $10,000.

To put it mildly: There are more erotica authors making $100,000+ a year than there are bloggers, get-rich-quick hucksters, or “lifehackers” who earn a similar amount.

If you’re a college student or just someone looking to make a few extra bucks, I’d highly recommend writing erotica. It takes very little effort (I can finish a story in under three hours) and you can build up a nice little passive income.

Best of all, it requires no special skills or major investment.

You don’t have to spend five months building a blog, or buy a book about SEO, or watch endless YouTube videos on optimized content.

Writing erotica is pretty much a fire-and-forget industry. You pump out books, throw them online, and then collect a royalty check at the end of every month.

How to become a mildly successful erotica author

I am not some wildly successful erotica author. I’ve never had a number one selling book or made $10,000 in a month from my work. But I’ve also never put a whole lot of effort into this venture.

As of right now I haven’t published a single new story in almost a month. Yet I’ve still got 21 different titles selling on a daily basis, churning out a decent side income. Is it enough for me to retire on? Of course not. But an extra $500 or $1,000 isn’t anything to laugh at either. It allows me to focus on other businesses and gives me a little extra capital to fund new projects.

One of the nice things about erotica stories is the fact that they sell themselves. A good cover and title will move books for you without any extra effort. I’ve never built a blog for my pen-name, started an email list, or even opened up a social media account. While all these things can definitely help boost sales, they aren’t essential. Unlike most other ventures, the learning curve is amazingly low.

So low, in fact, that I learned everything I know about the industry from one brief book. The Six-Figure Erotica Author by Jade K. Scott (Amazon). This is a concise how-to guide from one of Amazon’s most successful authors. Scott is so popular that she hasn’t published anything in months and is still ranked as the 58th highest grossing erotica author on all of Amazon. With 146 books, averaging around 30 sales a day per title, I figured Scott had some industry secrets worth sharing.

What The Six-Figure Erotica Author did for me

I purchased my copy The Six-Figure Erotica Author towards the tail end of December, 2014. I followed all the advice, wrote a handful of books, and watched my earnings increase modestly. Before buying the book I’d made a measly $100 in total royalties. After reading the book and following its advice for one month (and that included directly copying the sample story outline) I made over $230 in worldwide sales.

The following month I stuck to the book’s advice, turned out more stories, and earned roughly $500 in royalties. And then I doubled my profits again in March.

(U.S. royalties were about $175 in January)

$230 isn’t a lot of money, but it didn’t take much time to make either. It took nine hours for me to write all my books, averaging out to around $25 an hour. If I were a broke college student or underemployed graduate making minimum wage, I’d invest a few hours a night into erotica writing. The average monthly student loan is $242. You could write a few erotic short stories to pay your bills.

If you sat down and wrote two stories every Saturday afternoon, you’d end with about $1,500 in passive income.That’s almost as much as some people earn from a full 160 hour month of work. Summer is coming up and I know that a lot of college students will have plenty of free time. Why not do some writing to help with tuition next year?

Get paid to learn a new skill

For several months I’ve been working on a novel about killer goats. I enjoy pulp horror titles like Night of the Crabs (good review here) and The Rats. But, as anyone who has ever attempted fiction quickly discovers, writing a novel is hard work. Penning dialogue, pacing a story, adding descriptive imagery. All that stuff is immensely difficult.

Even writing something as pulpy as a flesh-eating goat story can become immensely complex and difficult.

This leaves you with two options: Spend thousands of dollars on fiction writing workshops overseen by some stodgy academic (who hasn’t published a bestseller either), or write every day while getting incrementally better.

Authoring and publishing erotica is a great way to make money while learning how to write. You get to practice your storytelling skills, hone your editing abilities, become an expert on keywords, and master the art of eBook formatting. All while getting paid.

If you’re really ambitious you can take these same skills you learn and use them to start a consultation business. I have several recurring clients who hire me to explain things like sales rank, keywords, and cover design.

You’re paid to learn and paid to teach.

How my “dud” book outsold Chris Kluwe’s memoir

During early March I released a really stupid book that was based around a nonsensical joke. My title peaked with a sales ranking under 30,000. This means that I was selling about seven books a day.

Eventually my sales rank fell to the 40,000 range. I was now selling three or four books a day.

(Rankings from beginning of March)

While this might not sound like much, my title was outselling hundreds of thousands of other books on Amazon. Including Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies by former NFL player Chris Kluwe. In fact, this one 3,000 word erotic story was selling about four times as many copies as Kluwe’s memoir was. Kluwe is a man with national fame and almost 200,000 Twitter followers. But my self-published book managed to sell circles around him, and without any sort of marketing or promotion.

This is actually a fairly common phenomenon. A self-published erotica novel once debuted on the same day as a new Stephen King book, and almost beat King out for the Number #1 spot on all of Amazon.

That’s because erotica is a multi-billion dollar industry. And one of the only big-money fields that’s easy to get into and profit from. Even as I write this, two of the top five Amazon bestsellers are erotica stories.

Create a sell-publishing empire today

The Six-Figure Erotica Author (Amazon) is one of the few books that’s had a direct impact on my earnings. This isn’t some theory title where you get 10 ideas to implement into your own business. You get actual, actionable information that can be used today. I got so much value from this short guide, that I even revoked my “no book reviews” policy to tell you about it.

If you’re looking for an easy way to make some extra money, erotica writing is a fantastic venture. You could easily churn out five or six stories a month and quickly create a four-figure recurring income.

What could you do with an extra $12,000 a year?

Click Here To Order

P.S. Need help formatting your eBooks? Check out this article on using Scrivener for self-publishing.

“John McCallum, both literally and figuratively, shaped an entire generation of would-be musclemen: His original articles have become classics and inspired many of today’s top muscle writers. To this day, many feel that these articles established the highest standard in the field.”

– The Complete Keys To Progress

“Keys To Progress” is the best fitness book I read all year

Most fitness books suck. And bodybuilding magazines are even worse. Everyone I know who’s tried to take advice from a weightlifting magazine has ended up looking fat and unhealthy.

Because of this, I never read fitness articles.

Sites like T-Nation, Men’s Health, and EliteFTS have continually declined over the years. In 2014 their authors discussed such pressing topics as the best breast implants for competitive lifters, how to walk a marathon if you’re 500 pounds, and why you’re girlfriend knows more about male fitness techniques than a certificated lifting instructor.

We were one “25 tongue tricks for pleasing your man” article away from seeing these sites turn into Cosmo.

The dilapidated state of modern bodybuilding culture makes it easy to forget that there once was a time were men were men and the gym was serious business. Guys did real exercises. They lifted heavy and ate big. There was no time for doing Zumba and texting in the squat rack.

John McCallum’s The Complete Keys To Progress harks back to the glory days of lifting. The book is a compilation of McCallum’s old articles for Strength and Health. It’s about as old-school as you can get.

There are no miracle workouts here. No celebrity guest interviews. I don’t even think McCallum used a single exclamation mark in the book’s 250 pages.

This lack of polish and over-enthusiasm is what makes Keys To Progress work. You’re being sold the weightlifting process, not some get big quick scheme. There’s no exercise of the month either. Every article builds on the last and you get an actual sense of progression. It’s really cool and not something that you see any more.

The mass building routine that works

2013 was my first serious year of weightlifting. I started as a twig. And I stayed that way until I stopped following mainstream fitness advice and started doing old-school exercises that worked.

One of these was the Super Squats program. While it helped me to gain weight, the program was a bit excessive and I’d get burned out really quickly. Bench pressing, deadlifting, squatting, curling, and doing pullovers was way too much.

Keys To Progress offers a much better alternative that’s just as effective. I know because it’s what I’d end up doing on a lot of the days when I was too exhausted to do the complete Super Squats routine:

• Press behind the neck: 3 x 12
• Squat: 2 x 20
• Pullover: 2 x 25

That might sound a little too easy, but it’s not. I guarantee that you’ll be worn out by the end. Coupling these lifts with a quart of cottage cheese, eggs, and a steak will lead to some explosive growth.

What I liked

Keys To Progress is a fun and informative book. There’s a lot of great fitness stuff, advice on staying motivated, and even some cool articles about things like building a home gym and making a drink with 200 grams of protein.

Of all the fitness books out there, this is one of the most comprehensive. If i were just starting out in the gym, this is the guide I’d pick. There are some simple workouts, like the mass building one I listed above, to get you started and more advanced ones for guys who’ve mastered the basics. While Starting Strength and other entry-level books are fine, they lack the scope the same scope.

Every article here is so well written, many of them read like a little story, and informative that it’s like reading a tiny book.

What I didn’t like

I had two issues with Keys To Progress. The first is font size. Whoever typed this up decided to use a printing press for ants. The font is still readable, but it was a little too small for my liking.

Secondly,the information presented here is almost 50 years old. There’s going to be some dated stuff. If you’re juicing vegetables or eating Paleo some of the nutrition advice will seem a bit silly. However, most of the material holds up pretty well. It’s even kind of interesting to see how many modern authors are rediscovering what McCallum knew back in the 60’s.

Closing thoughts

The Complete Keys To Progress is a great throwback to a time when bodybuilding wasn’t so cluttered with poor information. If you’re looking to get into fitness and exercise, or just looking for better routines, this book is worth a look. I really enjoyed it and picked up on some information that I’d never read about before.

Click here to see it on Amazon.