Well, to go meta, you get about 80% of the way with 20% of "insight porn". After a while it's just repetition, rephrasing and marketing. Self help and business

Well, to go meta, you get about 80% of the way with 20% of "insight porn". After a while it's just repetition, rephrasing and marketing. Self help and business growth mindset etc whatever we call this can become a trap in itself. Go out, do something boring and you'll learn more through that than reading little enlightening maxims. Sure some of it is helpful. Read some Kahnemann, some Taleb, some Marcus Aurelius, some classic novels etc. Reading can be good, you don't have to learn everything on your own example. But it's often the case that these lessons are only intelligible in hindsight. You may feel like you intellectually understood it and got some insight orgasm from it, but getting some actual stuff done then becomes more beneficial. Advice always depends on where you are now. It's never generic. These materials also put a lot of emphasis on the weird, the counterintuitive, the quirky, the paradoxical. But what you actually need to know first is the solid default normal way the world works. This can be learned from "boring" old textbooks, not from shiny new strange theories. Whenever you read something new about a surprising new discovery about the brain or physics or AI or whatever, think about whether you even know what the straightforward, non-counterintuitive result would have been. Do you even know the basics, the foundations or just have a large collection of curious bits and pieces of nice cocktail party did-you-know material?