My parents taught me to read at age 2 and the more I read the more I wanted to read. By the time I got to kindergarten, I had already read more than all the oth

My parents taught me to read at age 2 and the more I read the more I wanted to read. By the time I got to kindergarten, I had already read more than all the other kids. It inculcated the love of reading in me which paid dividends throughout my life. It helped me greatly as an adult. Most of my peers in the tech industry haven’t read a book since high school (because their upbringing didn’t emphasize reading). But reading books and believing you can actually learn things from them helps you enter fields outside of what you went to school for. I taught myself stuff from books. I learned from books how to navigate corporate culture (High Output Management), how business actually works (the Halo Effect, Hard Things), how charisma actually works (How to Win Friends), templates for doing things I’m not good at (Difficult Conversations, Getting to Yes) etc. Arguably you can learn all these things by reading articles and by watching YouTube. But books are special. Granted most books today have a lot of fluff but at least for the parts that are useful, books slow me down and help me absorb at a better pace. Similar to the idea of bioavailability of nutrients, books to me are more “bio available” in that they’re the same nutrients, but are better and more deeply absorbed.