Unless you're a millionaire or billionaire executive engaging her services, you may not be familiar with the name Lolly Daskal. But she's a very successful "executive leadership coach" to some of the most powerful people in the business world, and she recently revealed to CNBC an integral part of her daily routine: which involves reading a book at the beginning of each day. Here's how she put it:
"Every morning I read a book. That's my exercise time. Some people exercise their body — I exercise my mind."
When I picture someone reading a book a day, I imagine them devouring slim mystery paperbacks or other stereotypical leisurely reads, but Daskal's choices of reading material trends toward the expected places – business and psychology are two topics one can easily imagine her applying over the course of her job – as well as stuff like poetry and biographies. But in her recent interview on the subject, she singled out one book as being more important than any other, so much so that she rereads it every year on her birthday: Man's Search for Meaning, a memoir by Holocaust survivor and author Viktor Frankl. According to Daskal, she first came across the book as a teenager, and she's been enriched by it ever since:
"I first read it when I was 18 years old. It changed my life. Then when I reread it, it gave me wisdom. Then I reread it again and it gave me perspective. Now, I reread it on my birthday every year."
The resonant theme in the book for Daskal is one of self-reliance, saying that the book illustrates that "[t]here are some things that are going to be out of our control, but we can take back control by changing ourselves." Even with a prodigious book-a-day reading diet, it's one that's kept her coming back to the book for years.
