Every once in a while you come across a statistic is totally humbling. For a significant portion of my life I did very little reading, I viewed it as a chore or something to get through because a teacher assigned it as homework. From about the ages of 10-22 you probably never would have seen me reading a book for fun. For whatever reason that changed right as I was getting ready to graduate college and I have not been able to stop since. I have pretty much stopped watching TV during the week and you will always find me with 2-3 books that I'm reading at the same time.
I've set a goal that each year if I can get through 24 books at minimum I would be pretty happy with that progress. Between work, family, friends and any other commitments I have it seems like a reasonable target. Then I started thinking about how many books were in existence and how I would never even come close to reading them all. According to Google there are roughly 130,000,000 books that have ever been published. At 24 books per year times 60 more years (hopefully) that gets me to 1440 books that I'll read in my lifetime. Even if a person were to read 50 books a year for 60 years that still only gets them to 3000, or 0.00002% of books in circulation.
You could debate particulars about what constitutes a book, what about all the news articles and magazines a person reads, etc. but nothing you can do is going to move the needle at all. With the internet putting all human knowledge at our fingertips it's comforting to know that although we know have access to all of the information we're looking for there will always be more for us to learn.
I love coming across an article that relates to the topic I'm writing about. Here is an article from the New York Time Magazine, talking about some of the worlds greatest figures in art, business, and more. It's a really interesting read about what makes someone successful in life and even though we would consider these people the most respected in their fields they feel they are just getting started and still have a lot to learn.