Reading Seriously Changed the Quality of How I Think

I want to be specific about what I mean by serious reading because the casual version - airport fiction, news articles, the half-absorbed consumption of content on a phone - was something I had been doing for years without finding it particularly transformative.

What I mean is the sustained reading of difficult books that required something from me, that did not yield their value easily, and that I had to work to understand and then hold in mind long enough to let them interact with other things I was thinking about.

I am from Chicago and I worked in urban planning, and at 26 I started reading - deliberately, with a pace and attention I had not previously applied to books outside of university - across a range of subjects that were adjacent to my field but not of it: philosophy of cities, economic history, sociology of race and space, urban ecology.

The first thing I noticed was how different it felt to read something demanding slowly and completely compared to the fragmented, skimming way I had been consuming text for years.

The second thing I noticed, around month three, was that the quality of my thinking in meetings and in my planning work had changed in a way I could not initially attribute. I was finding connections between things more readily.

I was holding multiple frameworks for a problem simultaneously rather than applying the most obvious one. I was more comfortable with complexity and less compelled to resolve it prematurely into a simple answer. The reading was doing something to the cognitive infrastructure that I was then using for everything else.

At 28, a senior colleague asked me what I had been doing differently because she had noticed a change in how I contributed to strategic discussions. I told her honestly and she looked mildly surprised that the answer was books.

I have read consistently for four years now, at a pace of about two books a month that are chosen for difficulty rather than comfort. It has been the single highest-return investment of time I have made in my own development. I am not recommending a specific list or a specific pace.

I am recommending the experience of giving a difficult book the sustained attention it requires and noticing what happens to your thinking over the six months that follow. The return is slow and then it is unmistakable.