Creativity doesn’t come from glancing quickly at your Twitter feed while in line at Starbucks. It comes from deep thought. It comes from voraciously reading books—long books that require focused attention. It comes from meaningful discourse with other intellectually curious people. It comes from listening and asking good questions.

Reading is a time machine that allows you to acquire wisdom from the past and to analyze and imagine another person’s vision of the future.

Reading books is a way for you to communicate with and learn from the best thinkers that are writing today and that have ever lived.

In order to create something new, to invent a new product or idea, you need to anticipate where things are headed. That requires a mixture of certain habits of mind. You need to foster imagination, thoroughly understand the origins of past ideas, learn from others’ mistakes, talk to lots of people about ideas and test your hypotheses against people both alive and dead.

The art of investing is not about figuring out what has already happened. It’s about anticipating the futureand creating the future that others will read about in The Wall Street Journal.