I'm little bit baffled about what it takes to be good at something, building a business, being a good developer, designer, artist, whatever.

I recently saw a documentary about Pirate Bay, and I notice a pattern. I.e. Gottfrid Svartholm was all into the building stuff, he learned along the way, probably yes, he read books, articles, whatever, but what I've seen in many people his calibre is that they just work on something and learned more and more. They've become experts even thought they maybe didn't realised that.

So the question is, do we need to read all those book, articles, podcasts, documentaries to be good, or is it mostly waste of time that we could spend learning through practice?