These are practical, and I bet very effective, but I would only recommend living by them to workaholics. It does not lead to a balanced life, the social aspects are lacking. Reading makes you interesting? From my experience, it does not. People like to talk about popular media, food, music, local events and human relationships, and it’s hard to enter such conversations if you’re ‘out of the loop’. Perhaps the advice is just dated, information used to be rather rare, but now we are exposed to too much, so its value has fallen.
Sometimes, one will get the impression that if advice is good, everyone ought to know about it. This is dangerous. The advice works exactly because it’s not common. You’re playing a zero-sum gain, so all advantages are relative rather than absolute.
The advice has its place, it’s even very good, but it’s not optimal for all contexts. If you’re reassuring somebody else, for instance, then using absolute vocabulary is more effective. “I will have X done by tomorrow.” sounds better than some humble “I will try my best sir!”
Maybe one can read about whatever interests you while also knowing a bit about everything so you can talk about popular topics with other people who may not have similar interests.
And you’re right, this isn’t optimal for all contexts. Very context-specific!
These are practical, and I bet very effective, but I would only recommend living by them to workaholics. It does not lead to a balanced life, the social aspects are lacking. Reading makes you interesting? From my experience, it does not. People like to talk about popular media, food, music, local events and human relationships, and it’s hard to enter such conversations if you’re ‘out of the loop’. Perhaps the advice is just dated, information used to be rather rare, but now we are exposed to too much, so its value has fallen.
Sometimes, one will get the impression that if advice is good, everyone ought to know about it. This is dangerous. The advice works exactly because it’s not common. You’re playing a zero-sum gain, so all advantages are relative rather than absolute.
The advice has its place, it’s even very good, but it’s not optimal for all contexts. If you’re reassuring somebody else, for instance, then using absolute vocabulary is more effective. “I will have X done by tomorrow.” sounds better than some humble “I will try my best sir!”
Maybe one can read about whatever interests you while also knowing a bit about everything so you can talk about popular topics with other people who may not have similar interests.
And you’re right, this isn’t optimal for all contexts. Very context-specific!