Read business books that are ten years old or older. You'll know whether the companies they cite actually succeeded or failed, so you can separate lasting ideas from outdated case studies.
Read old books. And by old, I don't necessarily mean thousands of years old, though there's lots of wisdom from back then. Books that have had a little bit of time to age and to show their quality, which allows you to separate the examples from the ideas. I read a bunch of business books. And business books that are more than, say, 10 or 15 years old, I find a whole lot more valuable. Because those books, the examples they've cherry-picked to support their ideas, usually had time to either succeed even more or fall on their face. Often usually do the latter than the former. And by looking at the examples and seeing what happened to those companies after the fact, I get better context about the quality of the idea and also how strong the idea is separate from the examples. So I would encourage you to read more and don't worry about just having to read the very latest. Read the update and you're going to find a whole bunch of ideas, a whole bunch of wisdom there.
