Last night, at the premiere of Werner Herzog’s documentary on the internet, someone asked Herzog what he would say as advice to young filmmakers. Herzog replied: “Read, read, read, read, read, read.”

It reminded me of this 1916 quote from Henry Hazlitt, in his Thinking as a Science:

“A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one’s vocabulary and the greater one’s awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one’s thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grows together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.”

Replace thinking with making movies, writing code, creating whatever it is you create.