Quick point lest ye overgeneralize: Buffet, Bill Gates, and [insert Fortune 500 CEO here] read excellence porn on the way to the top. [from Buffet’s wikipedia: “Buffett took a Dale Carnegie public speaking course.”]
I think business porn doesn’t make you excellent, but it will expand your thinking, and shave years off your learning curve.
Charlie Munger (Buffett’s business partner) on this topic: “In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time-none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads-and at how much I read. My children laugh at me, they think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out”
If it’s just “how not to lose” now, I think that has a lot to do with the degree to which its messages have already been absorbed into the mainstream to the point that it’ll only bring you up to what other people in your field “ought to know.” At the time it was written, America was just starting to undergo a shift in the standard models of business, and the sort of thinking it promoted revolutionized how a lot of people approached the idea of building their careers. So it’s more like a supertrick that stopped being a supertrick because it was widely replicable.
Quick point lest ye overgeneralize: Buffet, Bill Gates, and [insert Fortune 500 CEO here] read excellence porn on the way to the top. [from Buffet’s wikipedia: “Buffett took a Dale Carnegie public speaking course.”]
I think business porn doesn’t make you excellent, but it will expand your thinking, and shave years off your learning curve.
Charlie Munger (Buffett’s business partner) on this topic: “In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time-none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads-and at how much I read. My children laugh at me, they think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out”
I would class Dale Carnegie not as excellence porn, but as “how not to lose.”
If it’s just “how not to lose” now, I think that has a lot to do with the degree to which its messages have already been absorbed into the mainstream to the point that it’ll only bring you up to what other people in your field “ought to know.” At the time it was written, America was just starting to undergo a shift in the standard models of business, and the sort of thinking it promoted revolutionized how a lot of people approached the idea of building their careers. So it’s more like a supertrick that stopped being a supertrick because it was widely replicable.