"If you're a person who learns from your mistakes (and that's a big IF), you will fortunately enjoy making your biggest mistakes as an investor when you start out, i.e. when you possess the smallest amount of money - now that's a really cheap education!"
Regardless of whether you think reading helps improve your investing abilities or not, there is a lot of wisdom in that particular sentence. There are a lot of people who want to start a business and on the constant search for business opportunities, but after they gain a certain level of success in the job it becomes nearly impossible to actually pull the trigger. The become paralyzed and fear overcomes them. The fear losing what money they have accumulated, however small it may actually be. I have noticed that among my friends and family the ones who have started successful businesses did so when they were still young, broke, inexperienced, and unsuccessful. They had nothing to lose in the first place, so jumping in with both feet was much, much easier.
My college friend was actually sitting in his favorite bar one day talking to his favorite bar tender who was also the owner. My friend had made a few comments that he needed to get serious about finding an actual career and quite job hopping. It was his lucky day because the owner took him aside on the spot and asked him if he wanted to work in the bar. And not only work, but actually become an owner in the bar and run it full time. Now 15 years later my friend has 3 nationally award winning micro brewery locations. He distributes the beer in several other communities on a regional basis.
My brother was a truck driver for a beverage delivery company and got sick and tired of not having air conditioning in his truck in 100 degree summer heat. One day he got so fed up with it that he returned a call to a friend of his who knew about an opportunity to purchase a local tool distributorship route. Two weeks later he owned the distributorship and he was barely 25 years old. Now 15 years later he is very successful and mostly debt free except for a pick-up truck payment and the lease payment on a delivery truck. He owns his entire inventory of tools free and clear.
I am sure investing works the same way. With Google worth more than $1,000 a share I bet there are hundreds if not thousands of people who invested $5-$10K in Google stock when it was first issued. If they held onto it, they've made some pretty good money. How does a 720% return sound? $1 turns into $72. $10,000 turns into $72,000 (if my math is correct). I've missed out on some pretty good chances myself becasue I let fear creep in.
I have accumulated $221k in my 401K investing 10-12% of my paycheck with no employer match for most of my career. Imagine what I could have potentially done if I had invested some of that 10-12% in individual stocks over that same time period (something I have started doing recently with some good results).
I missed out on Google, although I gave it some serious consideration when it came out. I also missed out on Domino's Pizza as well, after giving it some very serious consideration too.
If only I had read a little more, maybe I would have pulled the trigger on those two. (I say that jokingly because I would wager it's a very,very small percentage of people who read more than I do.)