Put Down The Business Book. Read Fiction Instead
Show notes
Look at your bookshelf. Business books, biographies, the ones everyone said you had to read. Now be honest: how many did you finish?
Jay Papasan should be the last person making this case. He's spent 30 years in business books - first as an editor at HarperCollins, then as coauthor of multiple award winning & bestselling nonfiction books. And this week he's telling you to put the business books down and pick up a novel.
Because somewhere between Gordon Gekko and hustle culture, business people decided that serious people read serious books - and quietly abandoned the oldest learning technology humans have. The research says that decision is costing you: focus, empathy, sleep, vocabulary, maybe even years of your life. And the fix can take fifteen minutes a night.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Why the business books on most shelves have never actually been read
- Why a 12-year Yale study found readers 20% less likely to die
- How fiction rebuilds an attention span that's shrunk from three minutes to one
- How fiction trains the empathy that tells you what your customer will object to
- Which sci-fi novel Gary Keller called the best business book he'd read in ten years
- Why you never owe a book more than 50 pages
(0:00) Why Business People Stopped Reading Fiction
(2:54) The Best-Selling Business Books Are Secretly Fiction
(5:51) What Reading Does to Your Lifespan and Focus
(10:08) Fiction Improves Your Empathy
(13:45) How to Read 50 Books a Year
(18:52) Five Sci-Fi Gateways
(22:41) Historical Fiction
(23:51) Easy Reading
(26:49) The Challenge: One Book, 50 Pages
The 10 books:
Sci-fi - Dark Matter (Blake Crouch), The Martian and Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir), Ready Player One (Ernest Cline), Wool (Hugh Howey)
Historical fiction - Gates of Fire (Steven Pressfield), The Alice Network (Kate Quinn)
Great, easy-reading fiction - For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway), Down River (John Hart), Beartown (Fredrik Backman)
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