Stop Reading Self-Help Books: The Incredible Power of Novels
How-to books can teach you specific skills. Only fiction will teach you how to live.
Elon Musk is perhaps the best-known entrepreneur on the planet.
He’s the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, among others. He’s reshaping how we use sustainable energy, and how and where we travel. When humans reach Mars, it will likely be thanks to his innovations.
But Elon Musk wouldn’t be a household name today if he hadn’t been addicted to reading fiction as a teenager.
Musk has been vocal about his lifelong love of reading:
“I was raised by books,” he said in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone. “Books, and then my parents.”
Though Musk was said to have read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica by the time he was 9, that wasn’t what shaped him into one of the world’s most powerful people.
Nor was it dense philosophical texts by the likes of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer he originally turned to for answers during bouts of teenage angst.
Rather, Musk cites as his influence Douglas Adams’s “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,” a fictional tale about a man named Arthur Dent who…
