Here is another post that shows the confusion between the value of good ideas and the charlatans that promote indiscriminate accumulation of knowledge cough Tai Lopez cough Djeezes, reading a book a day how superficial can you get? I will repeat my comment here since the original thread does not seem to be willing to engage in much discussion so far, unsurprisingly. I really want some intelligent pushback Original thread: KNOWLEDGE IS POWER! 📚... Does Reading Books Make You More Successful?
My comment to that:
Yes and no... books are vehicles for ideas. Ideas by themselves don't have much value. They are tools, if you are not applying them to something they are in fact useless. Don't get me started on Tai Lopez he is a charlatan... his advice of reading a book a day is not going to do much for you. Ideas need to be learned, used evaluated and discussed to fully understand them.
Derek Sivers has a great quote:
If information was all it took, we'd be all billionaires with 6-pack abs.
Same with seminars. If you don't act on the ideas, which most people don't do by the way, you are not getting ANY return on investment other than a temporary good feeling.
Some ideas require DEEP thinking: you need to stick with it for while to internalise them and then ACT on them. Better to deeply understand only a few and apply them consistently than hundreds you know superficially.
That said, it is always useful to have more tools at your disposal. The more useful ideas you know, and are able to apply, the better.
But you need to revisit ideas from time to time to get to the hidden, more advanced layers.
Take a book like Dale Carnegie's "How to make friends and influence people".
From the first reading you may take away say 5 ideas.
If you apply just one or two ideas consistently in your day-to-day life you might get amazing results.
But to extract the full value of that book, you have to come back to it and evaluate the ideas in it again WITH your newly gained experience, it is only then that the deeper meaning and consequences of the idea begin to reveal themselves.
Or you might actually find out these ideas are not as robust as they looked on paper, so you need to critically re-evaluate them.
A book like this you probably could/ should re read every YEAR and learn more and more sophisticated lessons from it each time.
Yes books can be great but it takes time and application of ideas to get value out of them.
Obviously there are also a lot of crap books so good curation is essential;
check out https://sivers.org/book for a great list.
Most of the books on this list are worth a read. But be selective, reading his notes might help you to decide if it is worth buying. His notes are awesome but by themselves are not always enough to really extract value, that requires mental and physical WORK.
Like the ideas?
Buy the book; read it absorb the ideas and apply them! Then later revisit when you have some experience...
For me, knowledge and understanding are very different things.
As an example, I may know what I should eat and why, what exercises I should do and why - but if I don't do them, I do not actually understand.
It doesn't matter how many books one reads on surfing and how much one knows, the first time on a board, you are going to get dumped (if you can even paddle out to the waves that is).
All information is good information when considered. Sometimes it is information you can use directly, sometimes it is information you can use to avoid, sometimes it can be manipulated to do something the information was not created for.
Information is just information. It is what one does with it that is important (if anything is actually important in this world)
It is also possible that pure action need no knowledge at all. Some of the best dancers in the world, do not know enough to teach.
A useful construct I find is that of Data-information-knowledge-wisdom
ultimately it is about how it impacts your day to day decision making:
In my classes I give the following example:
DATA
I see a brown block of something on my table, it is square smells nice (all data points)
INFORMATION
putting the data points together, I can be reasonably certain that is a piece of chocolate
KNOWLEDGE
from my experience, when I ate chocolate before I liked it alot, but chocolate is energy dense (another data point)
WISDOM
Given that my goal is to lose weight, I should not eat this piece of delicious chocolate.
It is only when you incorporate information into your knowledge and experience framework and then ACT accordingly, that it becomes useful.
If the data information and knowledge are in your head but you do not make your decisions in accordance with that, all these are USELESS
Strictly defining USEFULLNESS in this case as at an individual level as something that will help YOU achieve your goals by making informed decisions that will lead to ACTIONS that get you closer to your goals.