It seems obvious enough that always reading and never acting is pretty useless: even if you remember everything you read and it was all good information, there'

It seems obvious enough that always reading and never acting is pretty useless: even if you remember everything you read and it was all good information, there's no magic force that turns correct knowledge into anything useful to anyone else. So… spending every waking hour consuming information isn't a good idea if your goal is to deliver a product. That doesn't mean going in completely half-cocked is the answer either, though. Would you suggest that a budding young programmer skip reading about computer science, or about interesting new languages and frameworks? After all, C was a perfectly fine tool in the 70s—who needs anything else? And premature optimization is the root of all evil—why even think about algorithmic complexity? The good ol' linked list is all you should ever need, right? I don't know where exactly the happy medium is, but I suspect there is one. At some point, you have to start actually doing something. That doesn't mean talking and reading are a complete waste of time—just that talking and reading aren't building. They are, at best, giving you extra tools to build and sell a product in the future.