I’ve been watching this show called Ozark.

There’s a white trash character on it, some chick. She was talking to her brothers and she literally said, why are you reading that book?

The brother said, books are good for you.

He looked at her and said, “Maybe you should read one sometime.”

She looked at him and said, “I do, I read texts and I read my phone.”

And it got me thinking…

How many of you read books anymore?

Let’s be honest. Today I actually read 80 pages of a book. I had to stop reading the book because it was triggering me to be very upset, because I was reading about relationships and I was having an issue in mine not to long ago.

It made me wish that I read the book before I had the issue come up in my relationship. So, I got sad.

I felt really sad. So I had to put the book down.

But that’s okay, at least I actually picked up a book and didn’t just pick up the phone.

You’ve heard me talk about it over and over again in blogs and podcasts and everything that the phone is not your life, yet we’ve made the phone our life.

We spend more time reading texts than we do reading novels.

We spend more time reading quick little articles on our phone. Or, forget even articles because half the people in the world just read what other people post on Instagram or Facebook. We went from books to articles to quick little memes.

When’s the last time someone handed you a book and said, read this?

Most of the time people are handing you their phone and going, oh my God look what somebody posted, look at the funny thing they said underneath it. Sometimes people will criticize me on Instagram. They say that I actually wrote too many things underneath the video or the picture that I put up with a few words on it. We’ve got no attention span left anymore.

We spend most of our time glued to phones reading things that are quick because that’s what we’ve become as a society.

I have lots of books in my house, but it doesn’t mean I read all of them. I try to read a little bit each week.

I never seem to finish the books that I start, but at least I get an idea of some of the things that are out there.

There was something that I read today that every great entrepreneur and every successful person reads at least 30 minutes a day, and we’re not talking about text messages.

People read because it makes them smarter. It makes them wiser, it makes them more knowledgeable, it keeps their brain cells stimulated, it prevents Alzheimer’s and so many other things. The more we read, the more we know, the more interesting we become.

If you sit down with a group of people, they don’t really give a fuck that your friend Ruth texted you that day. They don’t care about what she said.

They don’t care about what’s happening on Tinder or on Instagram.

And they certainly don’t want to laugh at the stupid video you passed around to everybody else.

People still crave deep conversations. People still want and desire deep conversations.

Read, pick up a book. It’s important.

The more you read, the more knowledge you have the more interesting you become.

The more interesting you become, the more interesting people find you and the more people find you interesting the better life is going to be for you.