Also: it's quite possible that luck and generational wealth is a huge factor to whether or not you become profitable, in which case their book recommendations may or may not be useful.
And finally: did these founders read these books _before_ they became profitable, or afterwards? As the website says: "a few [succesful founders] weren't into reading books at all"
https://hbr.org/2017/03/stop-reading-lists-of-things-success...
Most analyses show unsuccessful business people do all of the exact same things that successful business people do, at least when it comes to the sorts of things you find in these books.
You might not become the next Jeff Bezos and that is ok. Being the millionaire next door is good enough for most people.
Besides nothing bad ever happened to anybody when they read more books, got more disciplined, did more exercise, eat healthy, took more proactive action and whatever it takes to improve their lives. Even the worst case scenario leaves you in a better state than where you started.
“If you act like Jeff Bezos, you’ll definitely become a millionaire.” How?
the guys who’s 5’5 should adapt different routine to become good then someone who’s 6’5.
in business the key is to find how your talents can be used best by you.
lastly, reading the wrong books is wasting time and time is all we got. it is akin to murder.
If everyone exercised more and ate more healthily, then everyone's physical condition would improve (apologies for being slightly ableist here).
However, if everyone read more books and took more initiative in the workplace, the market would adapt so that not everyone would benefit from it. Businesses would simply adjust downwards how much they pay for a given competency.
Honestly if everyone had more of these traits, there'd probably be a lot more small businesses and fewer dejected corporate employees who feel there's no hope for the future but to grind up the ladder.
I guess my conjecture is that whatever advice you give people to "succeed in business", the monetary rewards for following it will be drastically different if 5% of people follow it vs 95%.
My hunch is that markets adjust to whatever the baseline level of competency is, and I don't see how that's different if there's a lot more small businesses. To succeed in fitness and health you must compete with yourself; to succeed in business you must compete with others.
In all my reading of self help books, the advice comes along as obvious common sense stuff, except that stuff didn't come naturally to me. First time I read the GTD book from David Allen, all of it did feel revolutionary. After a few weeks it felt so obvious, it was left scratching my head. Why wasn't doing this before? Eat that frog was somewhat similar. If you have finite hours to do a thing, why would you spend it on doing work that wasn't very rewarding to you. Stuff like ruthlessly prioritising your interests above everything else, is pure 'common sense', but rarely do people do this.
Recently books like Atomic Habits have shown many people, stuff like exercise, or cooking a healthy meal should be a life habit in itself. You are better off developing a life long habit of doing a certain set of things that are a long term pay off.
Another book I read a while back, said something very obvious. Like You are 100% responsible for your life. Regardless of whether you wish to take control or not, you are in total ownership of anything situation. You can chose to not take control and act, but you are indeed in control.
This really puts the ownership of time, resources and even the future under your total control, and on a second look, this indeed seems to be the case. Except that when I actually came to realise I definitely think and act more proactively to put life interests above everything else.
As a general rule, I only have positive things to say about some of this advice.
i think a higher standard of professional competency in general would benefit everyone, and i can’t imagine some sort of equilibrium of skillsets in the labour market where there would be no opportunity to set yourself apart in your field.
What I like about this list in particular is that it clearly admits that reading these books by far does not guarantee anything. After all, they're recommendations.
However, having read almost all of these books before and during my own entrepreneurial journey, I positively noticed the absence of many fluffy "self-help" types that usually get recommended for new founders (the Napoleon Hill kinds of monstrosities).
This suggests that filtering who's recommendations to follow was a good idea.
That suggests that no matter how much survivorship bias is in the books themselves, the act of recommending them indicates that the founder who read the book AND built a successful business found SOMETHING valuable in the work that they deem worth reading.
Worse. These books are like porn. They are not real but a mimic the real act. No one I know and is rich can thank their success to reading these types of books. It's like people living to 100 when asked what helped them live that long and they come up with all sorts of made up reasons.
It's like having multiple mentors.
Don't get me wrong. I love such lists and am constantly on the hunt for new reading matetial. But there are flaws in these lists that are worth being aware of.