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Most of the advice in "How to Win Friends and Influence People" is fairly relevant and can be learned at any age - the book and Carnegie's courses were originally for older businessmen. The problem with the book is that its title and chapter titles have not aged well - they sound manipulative. The actual advice is very good and focuses on empathy and kindness; timeless concepts.

I've definitely seem people change their behavior after reading it well into their 30s and 40s.

I think what you gain by reading is exposure to someone else's way of thinking. You won't get that by sitting in a vacuum. If you're impressionable, you just assimilate the author's way of thinking without any criticism. That shouldn't be the goal here.

The key part of that quote (whether it's real or not) is the "and uses his own brain too little" part. It's not as helpful to read a book mindlessly like you're watching television and I think you're missing out on so much by just reading technical manuals. You need to form your own opinion about what you're reading by drawing on your own experience and things you've learned.

I'm pretty sure you didn't develop your way of thinking by yourself. You were influenced by mentors and other people's thoughts and opinions. So why would you intentionally stop evolving? How do you know you've reached some "optimal mental state"?

As an aside, if you're into well-written technical books that are enjoyable to read, check out Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

The primary form of escape reading provided for me was an escape from poverty. Books were my ladder, and my hope. Having few mentors to tell me of a 'world' outside of the one I was living, books were able to transport me to foreign lands, they helped me understand myself, others around me and the world a little better.

Through good books, I could have access to mentors who would would never know me, but I knew them through their writing, and I acquired the tools to add value to the world.

Yes there are many mass marketed B.S books, that's why I tend to read older books that are battle tested and still relevant today(Lindy effect).

Yes, some books have more impact or less depending on what period in our lives we read them, our personal motivations or what prior knowledge and the context that makes the book relevant to us.

Of the hundreds of millions of books in the world, we may only get to read maybe a thousand or so if we try. Someone could invest years of their life into something that takes 8 hours or so to read. I think there's a high chance that their experience reveals to us something which we wouldn't have imagined and amazes us about the world we share.

>mass market rubbish

Yep, that describes so much of what's popular.

One book I find goes in the opposite direction--I didn't get much from it when younger, but when I revisited it as a grown man, I suddenly saw a lot more value in it: The Bible. Which is about as far from "mass market rubbish" as you can get, considering quite a lot of it was written by people who were persecuted, tortured, and killed for writing it!

Bullshit. Reading pays off. Always. Just read good books.

You have only one life. But by reading you can assimilate cumulative wisdom from thousands of lives.

Sure, don't just read, personal striving is also needed for a wholesome life.

I agree that if a book claims to be amazing and life changing, it likely is not. I find books can offer singular insights, and intuition about how people and organizations operate, what psychological and historical principles are general, and so on.

I've found that most of the Einstein quotes I've seen online don't have a valid source, where did you find that one? Just as a heads up, since Walter Isaacson never mentioned anything similar to that on his biography of him.

'He loves quiet chats over his own dinner table with such friends as Gerhart Hauptmann and Professor Schrodinger. He reads only little. Modern fiction does not seduce him. Even in science he limits himself largely to his special field. "Reading after a certain age diverts the mind too much from it's creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life." In his own field of thought Einstein follows every development with keen interest. He has the gift of reading at a glance a whole page of equations. Einstein can master a whole new system of mathematics in half an hour.'

http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/uploads/sateve...

Not really the total repudiation of reading that this quote is being implied to be

Yea, there's more to the context of why he said that, thanks for sharing!

I believe you are doing your self a disservice.

As you grow older and “wiser” you realise that your time is precious. So you understand the opportunity cost of reading a book. You should then choose books that are foundational that are often the sources used by other books. You see more deeply into the meta meanings in the books, drawing many more links to other concepts hence you understand them better. This also means you could probably read much more deep/technical or difficult books.