Lately, I’ve gotten into audiobooks. Being fairly old and stuck in my ways, I’ve always said that unless you actually read the book, it didn’t count. For most of my life, my problem with audio books has been my self-diagnosed attention deficit disorder rearing its ugly head. When I’m listening to a book, my brain goes in every which way and an untold amount of time later, I don’t even know what just happened with the book!
Fast forward to nowadays, and I’m a bit more ok with it. Audiobooks that is. Perhaps I’ve got a little bit more experience on how to focus, or maybe I just like plowing through a book while working out instead of having to carve out time at some other point in the day to actually sit down and read. Either way, I’m now officially an audiobook person. Add to this that my wife showed me how the Libby and Hoopla apps work and I’m essentially an expert listener.
There are two audiobooks in my queue that I just haven’t mustered up the desire to push play on. It’s not that they wouldn’t be interesting, it’s that they’re flipping long!
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life is 960 pages long which translates into 36 hours and 58 minutes on audiobook. Who has that long of attention span!
The other is Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. which sports 832 pages or 35 hours and 3 minutes of audio. Think those will stay in the queue for a bit.
Turns out the longest biography is that of Winston Churchill. The completed project begun by his son Randolph Churchill and continued by Martin Gilbert consists of eight narrative volumes and 23 document volumes. In total, the books total over 42,000 pages, over 10 million words, and altogether weigh 108 pounds! I couldn’t find if the completed work was actually available as an audiobook, but applying the same math from the books above, the book would be roughly 1,619 hours long! Or 67 days of nonstop reading!
Yet, as I think about the duration of life, Winston Churchill died when he was age 90. That means he was alive for 788,400 hours. With his book being 1,619 hours long, you can tell he lived a lot of life apart from his biography. The book only represents 0.21% of his total life lived. Which means, the author had to leave out almost everything. The day-to-day minutiae of life never made it in the book, but it’s what made Winston Churchill who he was.
Turns out we write our own autobiography each and every day by deciding what we do, what we focus on, what we train for, what we spend time doing, what we worry about, what we fear, what we accomplish.
And, oddly enough, a quick Amazon search reveals that there are more than 1,150 books written about Mr. Churchill. Which means each book explores his life from a different perspective. And yours can too. The same life story can be told in many ways, and the way we tell it changes who we are and who we become.
Only you are the editor of the version that will be told.
Write with excellence today.
