> Also, regarding reading books c2c, it depends on the book. The smartest people I know have hundreds of books, but have fully read and re-read like a dozen of the ones that impacted them the most. For the other books, they've picked up snippets, but haven't come close to fully reading them.

I don’t claim to be one those people you describe, but this is also what I’ve found works well.

Some books are packed with amazing information, line after line. There is great value in reading the entire thing - the overarching narrative of reading it linearly provides additional value to reading it piecewise.

Other books might present one or two great ideas/concepts, but spread them out over a few hundred pages. These are the books I read piecewise, to “get the gist”.

The tricky part is knowing which category a book falls into. I imagine there is a level of required prior knowledge/experience before you can do this.

Ironically, there are books I used to think weren’t very valuable, or presented “obvious” ideas. Later, I’ve come back and found them incredibly informative. For what I thought was “basic” in my first year of university, I now respect as nuanced and important first principles, for example.