Former Tesla President Says This Habit Is the ‘Single Most Important Thing’ You Can Do to Increase Career Success

Jon McNeill has seen how some of the world’s top leaders operate up close. As Tesla’s former president, reporting straight to CEO Elon Musk from 2015 to 2018, and later as Lyft’s COO from 2018 to 2019, he has spent years working side by side with some of the biggest names in business. He currently serves as CEO of his own venture capital firm, DVx.

Throughout those experiences, he has observed that one habit distinguishes top performers from the rest: reading books. He believes the practice is becoming less common among young professionals.

“Reading is probably the single most important thing you can do,” McNeill recently told Fortune. “Over time, I noticed that many of the most successful people in the world read constantly.”

McNeill looks up to leaders who have made reading central to their success, like former Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, who spends as much as 80% of his day reading, and Elon Musk, who has long described reading as one of his greatest teachers. These leaders have left an impression. McNeill carves out an hour and a half each morning to read, a habit he says has shaped every stage of 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 told Fortune.

His reading list

McNeill said that two books on his reading list are 1929, a book written by New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin about the 1929 stock market crash, and The Sales Acceleration Formula, a book written by Harvard Business School professor Mark Roberge about scaling companies. Last month, McNeill also released his own book, The Algorithm, which explores Musk’s approach to launching Tesla and SpaceX. 

Reading isn’t just about collecting information. For McNeill, the habit is about feeding curiosity. That sense of curiosity, he says, has opened doors throughout his career, leading to his board seats at companies like General Motors, Lululemon and CrossFit, and fueling the growth of DVx.

Young people are reading less

Reading is a habit many top business leaders swear by. A 2025 JPMorgan survey of more than 100 billionaires found that cracking open a book is the top habit that they have in common.

Outside the business world, though, reading is falling out of favor. A YouGov survey conducted in December found that two in five Americans didn’t pick up a single book last year. 

The trend is even more pronounced among young people. In 2025, Americans ages 18 to 29 read an average of just 5.8 books, the lowest of any age group, according to YouGov. Another survey from the Walton Family Foundation revealed that 35% of Gen Z students say they don’t enjoy reading, and 42% rarely or never read for fun. 

Additional research from the University of Florida shows that daily reading for pleasure in the U.S. has dropped nearly 40% between 2003 and 2023. The researchers pointed to tighter schedules, financial stress and declining access to books and libraries as reasons behind the two-decade shift.