A few years back, I got completely sucked into the business and self improvement book genre, reading basically everything I could find of value. My favorites?
Rework, Anything You Want, the Lean Startup, Let My People Go Surfing.
But at some point, I started hitting a rut. Maybe it was the retreading of popular anecdotes. Or the fact that many books ended up leaning on the same tired and outdated examples to draw their conclusions. The process of reading started to feel like a chore, and I found I wasn’t retaining much from the books I was reading. I ended up taking a break from reading for most of a year.
Once I got the urge to start reading again, I decided to focus entirely on reading for pleasure. Initially I thought this would mean a lot of fiction, but the reality is that I was especially drawn to non-fiction, namely history.
The more eclectic my reading got – whether I was reading a book about Theodore Roosevelt or the environmentalism movement, I was drawing connections and analogies to my everyday work.
As someone who works in a highly specialized and technical field, being able to clearly convey complex ideas to non-technical audiences is a big part of my role. And the value of my eclectic reading has paid off in helpful anecdotes and analogies alone, not to mention expansion of my worldview.
I do still read plenty of business and marketing books – but I feel less inclined to guide my reading by what I “should” read, and instead what genuinely sparks my interest at the time. Chances are, if I’m absorbed by the reading, I’ll find a way to apply the material in some useful way in my life. But there’s no need to try and force it.