Will Rogers once said that there are three kinds of men: The ones that learn by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to touch an electric fence. Most of us would agree that becoming successful involves a lot of electric fence touching, methaphorically speaking, and being an alert observer of the world around us. Warren Buffet is from the first type and says that his secret to being successful is spending 80 percent of his working day reading and thinking. In an interview with him on how to get smarter, Buffet shared that he just sits in his office and reads all day. “I insist on a lot of time being spent”, Buffet says, “almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.”
I guess it might be because we don’t have $58 billion like Warren Buffet, I doubt that any of us could afford to spend 80 % of our workday reading – or who knows this might be the reason why we don’t have $58 billion. Anyhow, if you decide to invest in yourself and catch up on your reading, today I have picked for you two short posts that might challenge you to reconsider being the superstar, the heroic leader who carries the team on their shoulders and the one who always pulls the all- nighters. A controversial point of view about the dark side of heroic leadership in organizations: