When I first met Jeff Brown and he told me he had a podcast called “Read to Lead,” I was jealous. You can have a job telling people to read more? I mean, I used to teach college English, so I have literally been paid to tell people what to read. But half the audience is there under duress and the money’s not as good.
Now, as his podcast is only months away from its 400th episode, Brown and his co-author Jesse Wisnewski have released Read to Lead: The Book. Actually, the subtitle is “The Simple Habit that Expands Your Influence and Boosts Your Career,” which is kind of a big promise for something that may strike you as mundane. After all, we don’t exactly celebrate reading in our culture. Rather, we treat it at best as something “smart people” do or a guilty pleasure and at worst as a distraction, a chore, a slog, or something “nerds” do.
Well, if you haven’t gotten the memo, the nerds are taking over the world. And we don’t necessarily have the best definitions of what a “smart person” is, which is probably why you see the occasional clickbait headline expressing pleasant surprise that there are celebrities who read.
But let’s be real: It can feel difficult to find and take the time to read. We have so much else going on, so many other articles and shows our apps and friends are telling us to consume. Where to fit in time for books? Heck, I hold a PhD in English, and even I can find it difficult to find the time to read.
Reading Books About Reading Books
I have a friend—a poet with a communications manager side hustle—who loves reading books about reading books. That sounds quite meta to me, like when I see a flatbed trailer carrying other flatbed trailers on the highway. Some part of me feels like it’s parasitic or solipsistic or like falling into a black hole. But I think it’s more about finding your people. If you’re, like, really into books, then it’s fun to hear from other people who are really into books.
It’s possible that before Read to Lead, I’d only read one other book in this niche genre. That would be Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Jacobs writes to the choir, as it were, assuring people who want to read that it’s still a thing and even giving a great argument for why it’s okay to read on an e-reader. Many other examples take either a memoir, literary, or academic approach.
Read to Lead gives you the permission and the plan to read more
These all have their place, but Read to Lead is for the person who has a niggling voice in the back of her head that says, “Hey, you used to like reading. You should do more of it.” The voice bothers you every once in a while, but then life takes over again and you go another day, week, month, maybe even year without reading anything longer than a New York Times op-ed.
Read to Lead gives you the permission and the plan to read more. Brown and Wisnewski have personal reasons for loving to read, but the book begins with more immediate concerns. They take aim at business professionals who want to become better leaders. As such, they make the case for why reading will help you in your career and in your growth as a person. After all, we have empirical evidence for the ways reading can improve your creativity, communication, leadership, and more.
Once you know reading is good for you, it’s easier to work it into your professional growth and/or self-care strategies.
Read to Lead Has a Plan
Read to Lead is definitely a book for people who used to love reading as kids but got out of the habit. It’s also for people who never quite took to reading. Our authors are nothing if not practical. Most of Read to Lead offers various actionable strategies and techniques for improving your reading practice. They help you decide which books to read, how to set goals for reading, how to read faster, and even include a quick formula for calculating how many books you can read before you die. If you’ve never had a reading habit, Brown and Wisnewski have a low-stress, no-judgment approach to developing one.
For the person who feels super busy and has not made a practice of reading, these chapters contain simple, useful advice. Frankly, much of it will feel almost too easy or common sensical, but that is part of the value, here. Their whole point is that reading does not need to be difficult, mysterious, onerous, or whatever. Anyone can get better at reading, learn to read more, and so on. Sometimes you need someone to show you how simple the plan is to realize you’ve been talking yourself out of something for the wrong reasons.
Reading isn’t Just for Closers
A lot of this book has a familiar business-book feel with its easy steps and simple plans. Shoot, there’s even a section on tracking your reading so you can collect data on how much you’re reading and set goals. As a former professor of literature, however, I appreciate that reading is not all business for these guys. Nearly every chapter or plan has some nod toward the fact that some reading is pleasurable. It’s something we can do because it’s fun to do—and it’s something we can build into our reading plans.
Which makes sense. Not all books are primarily informative, and not all our life is consumed by the exigencies of productivity. Moreover, the benefits of reading do not all depend on the genre of book. If you want to have a richer inner world, Read to Lead encourages you to make that a reason to read more.
Just Go Buy It
If reading can improve your brain and your bottom line, then you should probably get reading. Read to Lead may be just the place to start if you need to justify the act itself to yourself.
Btw, my friend recommends Jacobs’s book as well as The Year of Reading Dangerously , Why Read?, and The Gutenberg Elegies.
Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash