Elon Musk on the most underrated reason to read a lot of books: Asked about the search for meaning, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO goes straight to reading volume. "I encourage people to read a lot of books. Just read, I mean basically try to ingest as much information as you can and try to also just develop a good general knowledge, so you at least have like a rough lay of the land of the knowledge landscape." The standard he sets is low on purpose. A rough lay of the land is all he asks for: "Try to learn a little about a lot of things." Then comes the reason, in the form of a question most people never think to ask themselves: "You might not know what you're really interested in. How would you know what you're really interested in if you at least aren't doing a peripheral exploration broadly of the knowledge landscape?" That question is the whole point. Reading widely works as a search function. You can only be drawn to a field you have actually encountered. The set of things you are capable of wanting is capped by the set of things you have been exposed to, and for most people that exposure arrives by accident: whatever your parents did, whatever your school offered, whatever your first job put in front of you. Read nothing outside that and you are choosing from a menu someone else handed you. Books are one input. Musk applies the same logic to people: "And you talk to people from different walks of life and different industries and professions and skills and occupations. Like just try, you know, learn as much as possible." Same mechanism, more surface area. When the interviewer reframes all of this as a search for meaning, Musk accepts the framing and routes it straight back to reading: "Yeah, what's the meaning of life and all. But just generally, like I said, I would encourage people to read broadly in many different subject areas and then try to find something where there's an overlap of your talents and what you're interested in." The reading populates one half of that overlap. Talent, the other half, tends to reveal itself whether you go looking or not. @elonmusk is specific about why talent on its own falls short: "People may be good at something, or they may have skill at a particular thing, but they don't like doing it." Talent on its own is a trap. Being good at something generates praise, money and more of the same work, which locks you in years before anyone asks whether you enjoy it. Plenty of people end up a decade into a career they excel at and quietly resent, having optimised for the half of the equation that pays out fastest. His conclusion: "So you want to try to find a thing where that's a good combination of the things that you're inherently good at, but you also like doing."