Fisher’s books are not cookbooks, but neither are they motivational books about why you should go ahead and cook. And yet they motivate. But even dry, fact-heavy tomes – in various disciplines – are motivating to strong people.

My point was that you were being whimsically reductive, and failing to acknowledge a huge slice of the population that doesn’t read or learn in the way you describe, and yet still excels. And I think I understood your post perfectly.

I’ve read just about all of Fisher, and I relish books like Think Like a Chef or Paul Bertolli’s Cooking By Hand. But those aren’t “cookbooks.” They are books about cooking.

My distinction is that there are plenty of fields with ‘cookbooks’ in them, but business books tend to go the other direction. I wasn’t saying one was better than the other, merely that reading for recipes isn’t particularly productive when it comes to business.