When you look at all the books together, there's nothing wrong with that. If you look at them all together on one shelf, you might think, 'How could I ever read all these? Therefore, I won't read anything. It's too much.' So, I thought that at one time, and then I heard this lecture by a person called Brian Tracy, and he was talking about how to get things done. In the lecture, he said, any large task that seems to be beyond your capacity, you can break into small parts. And he called them slices. And then, if they're in small slices and you do them regularly, then, amazingly, you'll be able to complete big tasks. Sounds common sensical, doesn't it?

When it comes to reading the books, I was driving home from somebody's house, and I was thinking about what he said, and I was thinking about all the books. As soon as I got home, I started noting down how many pages were in each book, because I realized that there's a finite number of pages. There's a finite number of pages in the Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, right? At least on this planet. There are other planets, higher planets, where there are more volumes. So, you can aspire for that too, if you like. And when I realized there's a finite number, I thought, well, let me get the number, because then I can divide it into small slices.

So, I made a little chart with a little help from my friends, and it had a list of all the Prabhupāda's books, and then it had next to it time periods that it would take to finish each one. And I discovered that there was a finite number, and I can ascribe a certain number to read each day in order to complete within a set amount of time. How helpful on a scale of one to ten? You might say, 'Vaisesika Dasa, on a scale of one to ten, how helpful was that to you?' I'd say it was about a ten, because I immediately felt energized, and I thought, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to pick a number of pages I can read each day, and I know for sure that I'll complete it within a certain amount of time.

And then I branded it. You want to hear what the brand is? Be a sage, page by page. And I took to this discipline of reading a certain number of pages a day. On a practical level, on paper, I have these flags that you get at any office supply store, and you stick them, and you can unstick them, and unless you get some grit on them, they'll stick over and over again for maybe hundreds of times. And so, what I do is get two of them, and on one of them, I'd write the number of pages that I was going to read every day. And on the other one, I put a little arrow. So, there are two flags that I used and still use.

(excerpt from the talk)

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Add to your wisdom literature collection:

https://www.bbtacademic.com/books/ (USA only)

https://thefourquestionsbook.com/

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