Former Tesla president reveals the ‘single most important thing’ you can do for your career—it’s a habit Elon Musk and Warren Buffett share too |
Former Tesla president reveals the ‘single most important thing’ you can do for your career—it’s a habit Elon Musk and Warren Buffett share too
Jon McNeill has had a front-row seat to how the world’s most successful leaders operate. As former president of Tesla—reporting directly to Elon Musk—and later COO of Lyft, he’s spent years working alongside top executives.
Across those experiences, he’s noticed one habit that consistently sets high performers apart, yet seems to be fading with younger professionals: reading books.
“Reading is probably the single most important thing you can do,” McNeill told Fortune. “Over time, I noticed that many of the most successful people in the world read constantly.”
He pointed to leaders like former Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, who has said he spends as much as 80% of his day reading as well as Musk himself, who has long credited books as a key source of learning. After seeing that pattern up close, McNeill built a habit of an hour and a half of reading into his own routine—something he says has been critical throughout his career.
“I feel like this exercise of reading every day really refreshes my brain every morning, and it keeps me engaged in a way that I wasn’t before,” McNeill added.
At the time of interview with Fortune earlier this year, McNeill said he was reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929 and Harvard Business School professor Mark Roberge’s The Sales Acceleration Formula, a book........