Mikael Cho reads biographies early in his career to learn repeatable patterns from successful people, then stops once he sees the same behaviors across multiple books. He calls it knowing the rule book: useful for deciding when to follow rules and when to break them.
Chapters
When you're first starting to read, for example, and you read three or four biographies or sorts of companies, you start to see the things that everybody did that seemed to make it work and you start to adopt those. And then I think that's like a pause moment. You're like, okay, I don't need to go and read another biography. There's some reinforcement that already happened here. When you start to build those systems and you see that that has come. You've seen that happen in three or four other people who are successful or that you've looked up to. I don't think you need to go and read that extra book to be telling you so. There was a moment in time where I read a lot and then there was a moment where we're out in the field. It's almost like you're reading the rule book so you understand the rules. So you understand when you need to stay to the rules and when you need to break them.