I'm not talking about libraries, or used bookstores, or art bookstores, or museum bookstores.

I'm talking about book stores that sell new books.

Crisp, unworn, unwrinkled books.

Books with no past. No stains.

No previous owners.

But why? Why do they drive me so crazy?

Well, I think it has something to do with the cover art or the colorful and coordinated patterns of their spines.

Bookstores are basically like art galleries with stories attached.

Another thing that blows my mind about bookstores is how powerful the merchandise is.

This book started a war, this book invoked a fatwa,

this book was passed down orally for hundreds of years and here they all sit before you and I barely read any of them. and

This is really what drives me insane.

There's so many books, but not enough time. Between Netflix, podcasts,

Social media, binge worthy cable shows, The New Yorker, and the 24-hour news cycle.

How the fuck am I supposed to find time to pick up a book?

I guess if I had to describe this feeling it would be like the reading version of FOMO.

Which is just exacerbated by the staff picks section or those little award stickers.

I can never leave the bookstore without buying at least three books and we all know what happens to them.

So my quest is twofold. First, I'm gonna search for the most beautiful

bookstore in the world.

Well, not really the whole world, mostly just Western Europe and South America. And second,

I'm gonna ask a bunch of incredibly smart people to help me figure out how to read more books.

Because right now my whole content diet is out of whack and if I continue at this pace, I'm gonna know jack-shit before I die.

I want to first...

show you what you're currently doing because that will actually stress you out in a way that I think will be helpful.

This is Tim Urban

He's an entrepreneur,

A TED speaker and has a pretty influential blog called Wait But Why,

which influences the likes of well Elon Musk.

I Figured if anyone could help me get perspective on my book store anxiety, it would be him. Okay. So how much do you read?

I probably read, look if I'm being honest, like a book a year. Okay. I need to qualify this, when I say one book a year,

I'm just meaning one book for pleasure. Simply not for work or skimming self-help books

How [stumbles] How long are you gonna live? My oldest grandparents lived till about like 90. So you have 55 years left.

So, let's just look at this here

All right.

Okay, it's a book

So this is the book that you're gonna read this year, okay, and this is the book you're gonna read next year and

this is the book that you might not finish because you're gonna die while reading this book here.

Okay, this shelf here, up here, is

about 55 books

This is all the books you're ever gonna read again, this is it.

I wish I had read more books.

Let's just figure out how fast you're reading. I want you to read from here to that dot.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul.

Lolita

For tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap at three on the teeth

Lo-Li-Ta

Okay

Okay, six minutes and 27 seconds. -

It felt like eternity. Okay so, you read

about 1550 words in 6 minutes 27 seconds 397 this worked out really nicely. You read a book in about ten hours.

Somehow I feel like you don't, but I'll give it to you. You were racing there. You were timing but look I mean

let's just give you the benefit of the doubt.

Sleep is good, but books are better

George R. R. Martin

Okay, you're awake about sixteen hours a day. That's thirty two half hours a day it's kind of allowing

you thirty two half hours, right currently at one point six four minutes a day

this is this is what Max allots to reading now, but if you allotted

one of these of every day to reading, you will become a major reader who'll read a thousand books instead of fifty-five.

Wait a minute. To read nine hundred and forty five more books before I die

all I need to do is read 30 minutes a day. Someone will be like, "Oh my grandfather. He's this great reader

He's read everything." That's you versus being like,

"Yeah, my grandfather literally has not read anything ever." The secret of the people who were like, "Yeah,

here are my 10 favorite books of 2016." and you're just like how do they...

It's... They just do this and you don't. Tim was giving me new

hope. Maybe there was a way to overcome my book anxiety after all.

You wake up in the morning and you flip on an audio book while you're brushing your teeth and making breakfast.

Done. That's it. You've done your thirty minutes

If you read for two hours every Saturday, you like to wake up in the morning and you have a Saturday session in a coffee

shop reading. You've just done four sevenths of your week.

It's very inspiring when you realize how easy you can read a thousand, and this is at your slow ass reading rate.

This also just speaks to the power of habits, because if you have the right habit,

that's a breeze.

If you don't have the right habit, you'll do it four days in a row, and then you'll take 40 days off.

At 30 minutes a day. Only.

you can read this,

and War and Peace,

and Moby Dick,

and three other books.

Okay

We are now heading to Europe, to Brussels first actually, to see one of the most amazing bookstores in the world.

First stop: Brussels.

A city famous for beer, chocolate, Tintin, the EU and now a bookstore on the city's outskirts called

Cook & Book.

Okay, so I am here at Cook & Book

It doesn't look like much from the outside, but look at the size of this place.

It's spread out across one, two, three, four, five six, seven eight buildings

Cook & Books' nine different libraries include the literature room,

The English bookstore,

Travel,

Fine Arts,

comics and graphic novels,

Music,

Oh and then there's the home and garden room, the cookbook room and the children's bookstore.

It's like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory but the bookstore version

Okay, well today has gotten off to somewhat of a rough start

I had wanted to leave

Brussels at 11 but I woke up at around 11:30

It's now one

The book store closes at 6:00

And I'm renting a car to drive to Maastricht, which should only be about an hour and a half, we've got the rental car

Okay, here we go the great European driving experiment.

I think I got it. I'm on the wrong side of the road already.

It's a church. Dominican church and it's empty for almost 200 years.

We celebrate carnival in it, it has Christmas markets in it, Napoleon's stored his horse and carriages over here

Different things.

My favorite story about the church is that it housed the local guillotine in the 19th century.

Indiana Jones.

I like these books.

Do you read a lot of books? Yes. 50 to 60 books in a year. 50 to 60 books a year?

Yes. That's a lot of books. That's a lot of books, yeah. A lot of reading. Do you watch TV?

Little, just little yeah, not much. Yes

I hope I will be able to confide everything to you as I have never been able to confide in anyone

And I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support

How do you make time for all those books?

I go to bed to bed early and make time to read. Yes. How many... how many hours a day would you say you read?

One to two hours. Yes. Depends how tired I am.

Thank you so much.You're welcome. I really appreciate it

Bye.

I like big books and I cannot lie.

I think that I'm over doing it with news. I gorge myself on news.

So you said you read the news

about 20 minutes a day and you're on social media another 30

50 minutes a day of those things adds up to three hundred and four hours a year

Which would be, at your rate, over 30 books. So you're saying there's a 30 bookshelf that is filled...

With news and social media.

Right now what we're doing is we're taking a 30 book shelf that you are reading every year and we're taking 17 of the News and

social media books out and

We're putting in 17 new books

There's a blog called Barking Up the Wrong Tree by a guy named Eric Barker

and

His blog is super popular, it's great and

It's about, you know, for his... in order to write he needs to read one or two

Even three things just to write one post. He doesn't post every week. So he must read fifty maybe a hundred books a year

He has some magical secret. I don't know what it is, but

You're trying to go to 18 if he's reading 50 or 100. That's a whole different thing

and again, you know he has he does other things with his time, so I didn't know what

His secret is but you should talk to him

My name is Eric Barker and I'm an addict.

This is Eric Barker. Over the last 10 years

he's become one of the most popular writers on the internet with his blog "Barking up the Wrong Tree" now available in best-selling book form.

His posts like "Six Hostage Negotiation Techniques That Will Get You What You Want"

and "how to make your life better by sending five simple emails"

Draw from cutting-edge findings in science and human behavior to distill clear and simple life hacks

Like talking to yourself using the word you "you can do it", "you're the best" is actually more effective than using the word I.

I can't. I suck.

For each post he does a ton of research including reading multiple books and journals and conducting long interviews

And he's posting one a week. So how do you do it? What's your process?

How do you get through so much material? On my phone. I don't have Facebook. I don't have Twitter. I don't have email

My instinct to check social media, I've redirected towards the Kindle app

I give myself three checks a day unless there's an explicit reason when I know an important emails coming in

So it's like, you can check everything now. Facebook, Twitter, Email. Get it all done

but anytime I have that urge to check, you know, I pause for a second and I'm like

Is there a good reason for this? And if not, I redirect that towards towards reading a blog

Yet habit strange thing what cannot have it accomplished?

Do you read on your iPhone? Most of my reading takes place on my iPad where it's it's really

Is it iPad or Kindle?

It's the Kindle app on the iPad

Interesting.

This also just speaks to the power of habits because changing a habit is like

Overriding your current software and if you do it enough times

What's cool about your brain, is it rewrites it to accommodate the new behavior you're saying?

Oh

I guess we're doing this everyday now. In his book, The Power of Habit

Charles Duhigg says habits emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. When an action becomes a habit

It actually moves to a different part of the brain. You see decision making and willpower take place in the prefrontal cortex

That's prime real estate when we turn an action into a habit

It migrates to the basal ganglia and therefore frees up space in the prefrontal cortex

for other more important decisions

There's one expert in terms of habit formation BJ Fogg at Stanford and I love this one principle

He uses it's called minimum viable effort

When you're trying to build a habit, he says the key thing is consistency, because if it's not consistent, it's not a habit

So minimum viable effort you want to start flossing more? Okay, floss one tooth

Just floss one tooth. Make it so simple that you can't not do it

I'm gonna read one page. It's so simple. I can't not do it. I'd feel like an idiot

once you can do that for like two weeks straight great two pages.

As opposed to setting this crazy high goal, failing, feeling bad, not wanting to do it

Now you've got a Pavlovian association where it's like, oh, I tried that it didn't work

I don't feel good. In discussing helpful ways to build a habit, Duhigg talks a lot about

rewards like giving yourself a piece of chocolate,

or in my case a mini Cinnabon, every time you perform a desired habit

The difference between the thousand book reader and the 55 book reader in their lifetimes isn't really much

It's one has the right habit and the other one doesn't have the right habit

Rigid the skeleton of habits alone upholds the human frame

Do you read one book at a time?

Or do you read like five books at once?

I read multiple books at once and especially, you know, when you're when you're starting out, you know, try and build that habit

totally read multiple books because once again you you kind of want that you want that you wanna be excited and

At least at first, you know, it's like if it if you're excited about something and then it doesn't pan out

You're not so much fine. The most important thing is you want to keep reading you want to build that reading habit

So if it turns into a slog put it aside take the next one because first and foremost just make sure you're enjoying it

What I kept hearing him say was: allow yourself to fall in love