Put Down The Business Book. Read Fiction Instead
About this episode
Jay Papasan argues for the benefits of reading fiction over business books.
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…
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