Ideas

Here is an uncomfortable truth that most people in publishing quietly agree on but rarely say out loud: the average business book is about fifty pages of real insight stretched across two hundred and three hundred pages of book. That's not a criticism of authors. It's a criticism of an incentive structure that has long equated length with legitimacy. A thin book feels like a pamphlet. A thick one feels like expertise. And so authors pad, repeat, and illustrate the same point

Reading hasn't disappeared — it's just changed shape. From audiobooks on the commute to late-night doom-scrolling, we're consuming more words than ever. So why does it feel like we've stopped reading?

Napoleon Hill claimed his bestselling book "Think and Grow Rich" began with a conversation in 1908, when industrialist Andrew Carnegie allegedly challenged him to interview successful people. The self-help author then spent over two decades studying and 'interviewing' the world’s most successful people. Hill said that conversation with Carnegie inspired a lifelong pursuit and gave rise to one of the most influential business books of all time. This image was created using gen