Knowledge is attainable. If you are willing to put in the time to learn, you can become an expert in just about anything. Books is your best way to start. Elon Musk has a famous quote on this… whenever anyone asks him how, with no engineering background, he learned to build space rockets, this is his three-word answer: “I read books.”

I learned this lesson early. My dad, a MIT physicist, used to have no mercy on me as a kid when we played chess. He would destroy me every game. I got so mad once that I decided I was going to spend the entire summer between my freshman and sophomore year studying the game. I read every book I could get my hands on. I remember my dad would come home from work with countless pages made by his copier at work scanned from chess books. Well, by the end of the summer the tables had turned and it was me who was mercilessly beating him at chess. After that summer, he didn’t want to play chess much any more. And I learned a lesson that has been serving me ever since: You can get really good at stuff just by reading books.

(change this image to playing chess with Dad)

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