If you’re a pretty dedicated reader you may be able to get to reading a book a week, so roughly 50 books a year. Over 70 years of reading at that pace you’d read around 3,500 books — counting comfort re-reads like Harry Potter for the 3rd time. I only know a few people who actually manage to read like that, so presumably, for most of us the likely book reads we will manage is much less than that.

To put that number in context, our local bookstore has around 30,000 books. So if you were to use your entire life’s reading in that store you’d still only be a bit over a 10th of the way through. That’s a lot of books you didn’t even get a chance to start.

I won’t deny that 3,500 books is a lot of books, but whatever you do there will be far more books that you just don’t have time to get to than those you do find time for. So, like for movies, I think it seems wise to be at least a little thoughtful about what books you choose to pick up, and what books you decide to go on to finish.

In the course of making this, I learned that in 2010 the Google Books team estimated there were around 130 million books to choose from.

My Dad, and sketchplanation supporter (don’t tell mum), talked to me about the book a week figure.

3,500 Lifetime reads

For almost all mammals that’s more or less how much you got. Remarkably, from the teeniest, tiniest shrew weighing just a few grams, to the largest whale — passing through animals as different as robins, monkeys, sea lions, and giraffes in between — each mammal has broadly in the region of 1.5 billion heartbeats. You can see the striking regularity in the logarithmic chart in the sketch.

What’s more, other aspects of mammals can be predicted to a surprising accuracy simply from their weight. A tiny animal will have a heart that goes like crazy, live only briefly, and reach maturity quickly. A large animal, in contrast, will have a slow heart rate, a long life, and take its time to adulthood.

The biggest outlier is us, largely because in recent years we’ve managed to significantly extend our lifetime from what would be expected from Nature.

This gem I learned once again from Scale by Geoffrey West.

1.5 billion heartbeats in a lifetime

The sweet spot for flow and mastery where the task is not too easy, not too hard — it’s just right. 

Also, just the right spot for learning similar to Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. In that model when you’re out of your comfort zone, and not in your anxiety zone you’re in the learning zone.

And yet another way of looking at it, still without as catchy a name as Goldilocks tasks, is getting the right match of challenge to your skills to avoid anxiety and boredom and be in flow via Milhayi Csikszentmihalyi.

 I learned the name from Dan Pink’s excellent book Drive.

Goldilocks tasks

I love Flow. This simple framework comes from Good Business by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Match challenge with skills for Flow at work

Mnemonic from the entertaining and informative book Made to Stick.

Make your idea sticky

Stuff, choice, information and tooooo fast. Time to cut down. From Simplicity Parenting.

The four pillars of too much

From The Design of Business. With a little reflection the funnel is pretty trivial. But I do think it’s a useful way to think about things. At what stage is your business? Still tackling a mystery like Xerox Parc, or getting it down to heuristics like Zynga, or refining out an algorithm like McDonalds.

Sketchplanations tagged with book