Re:Knowledge is power, 30 books every young entrepreneur sho...
by rokhayakebe on Saturday August 11, 2007 @04:20PM
(#41552)
I agree partially, I am not saying that you shouldn't read the most you can. I used to read one book a week. I found that when you read different subject, then that is good, but when you read the same subject over and over again, you usually end up with the same data or you end up with so much information that you can hardly act up on it. Reading to learn about entrepreneurship is good, but DOING is much better and I still believe that reading 40 books about "lisp" is not going to make you better than reading 5 great ones and using the rest of your time practicing. Although the point of reading is not solely to gather information, it automatically comes with it. The server between our ears stores it all. No delete. Rarely. At the end if you want to read 30 books that are truly valuable to you, then read HISTORY before and after the major World War and Market crashes. Read about Ricardo competitive advantage theory.
Success alone is word we shall use with care. Successful at is better. And you are successful when your grandkids' kids read about you (of course in a positive manner) in their class. Most likely you won't be here to know that you have succeeded.
I've found that they don't directly compete. I usually read books when I'm a.) mentally spent and unable to work on much of anything intellectually or b.) in a place where I don't have a computer, eg. the subway. If I weren't reading I'd probably be watching TV or posting on news.YC or something like that.
Also - I'd highly recommend against reading only 5-6 titles on a subject. You want that 95% overlap, because the point of reading books isn't to gather information (there's Google for that...), it's to train your gut instinct with other people's mistakes. All books are highly contextual - after all, other people's advice is only relevant when their situation is similar to yours - so you need to triangulate between them and figure out what's relevant in which situations. You're trying to develop the intuition that says "No, this is a bad idea" when you're about to do something stupid, and the way to do that is to read enough about stupid things other people have done that your mode of thinking shifts you away from that.
You know you've succeeded when you forget your sources.