Close-up woman hand holding a book to read.
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Reading for pleasure in the US has declined more than 40 percent in the past twenty years and it’s costing leaders their critical thinking edge. I was part of that statistic. Now I’m not.
On January 19, 2025, I deleted Instagram. By December 31, I had read 23 books. These two facts are connected—and they taught me something about what leaders are losing in an age of AI-generated content and optimized everything.
The Problem We Don’t Talk About
We’ve engineered reading out of our professional lives. Podcasts at 2x speed during the commute. Skimming articles for bullet points between meetings. Summarizing books with ChatGPT so we can say we “read” them during leadership offsites. I did all of this. I was efficient. I was also getting worse at thinking.
As Jay Caspian Kang recently wrote in The New Yorker, “The experience of reading can benefit from the rockier mental terrain that books provide; the boredom and impatience that longer texts sometimes inspire can help push and prod one’s thinking more than things that are perfectly distilled.”
We’ve distilled everything. And in doing so, we’ve lost the ability to sit with complexity, the very skill our roles demand.
The Science of What We’re Losing
Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf describes what she calls the “shallowing hypothesis”: digital media weakens our deep reading circuits, making it harder to engage in the slow, effortful process of critical thinking. Our brains, trained on scrolling and skimming, start hunting for dopamine hits that linear reading doesn’t deliver on demand.
This matters more now than ever. As we integrate AI tools into our daily work with the help of Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, we risk outsourcing the very thinking those tools are supposed to support. Reading is how we build the cognitive muscle to evaluate, question, and synthesize. Without it, we become editors of AI output rather than original thinkers.
Critical thinking starts with the capacity to hold multiple perspectives, tolerate ambiguity, and ask better questions. These are not skills that can be bullet-pointed. They’re built through the slow, effortful work of engaging with complex ideas that a reading practice forces us to practice.
Fiction Is Not a Waste of Time
One of the CEOs I used to coach told me fiction was the only way he could wind down at night. He was a business book addict like me, but reading them before bed turned him into an insomniac. He was onto something.
Research now shows that fiction isn’t leisure. It’s training. Psychologist David Kidd established in the journal Science that literary fiction sharpens our ability to navigate complex human emotions. When we read stories, we practice inhabiting perspectives other than our own. Non-fiction gives us information. Fiction gives us experience.
For leaders, this matters. Every difficult conversation, every organizational change, every strategic decision involves understanding how other people think and feel. Fiction is simulation training for empathy. In an AI-driven world, that capacity for deep, empathetic immersion may be our most valuable professional edge. And the benefits extend beyond cognition. Reading also improves sleep and reduces stress.
The Power of Story
I first learned what reading could do in eighth grade, when my English teacher Mr. Reynoldson opened all the classroom windows on a freezing January morning in Wisconsin and read us Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. By the time he finished the first chapter, I’d forgotten the cold entirely. That was the lesson: a story can take you somewhere so completely that your own body disappears.
Leaders who tell stories well know this power. The best CEOs, the best CHROs, the best managers don’t just share data. They create experiences. They transport people. But you can’t tell a great story if you haven’t experienced what great storytelling feels like. Reading fiction is how we learn that.
I lost this somewhere along the way through high school essays, college textbooks, self-help optimization, and audiobooks while multitasking. Reading became about extracting insights, not experiencing ideas.
Last year, I found it again. The first book on my pile was Percival Everett’s James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved man, Jim. One line stopped me: “The remarkable truth, however, was that it was not the pistol, but my language, the fact that I didn’t conform to his expectations, that I could read, that had so disturbed and frightened him.”
A book about the power of literacy and voice, found the day after I deleted Instagram was the momentum I needed to start the reading journey.
How Reading Builds Critical Thinking
Reading isn’t a luxury. It’s leadership development. Here’s how to rebuild the muscle:
Cut, don’t moderate. If social media is fragmenting your attention, eliminate it entirely for a period. See what fills the space. You can’t think deeply if you’re constantly interrupted, even by yourself.
Start with ten minutes. My brain had forgotten how to read linearly. The first day, I managed five minutes before reaching for my phone. Critical thinking requires sustained attention. Rebuild it gradually. The Forest app will help you get through those first uncomfortable ten minutes.
Read fiction. If you’ve been a business-book-only leader, give yourself permission to read novels. They’re not a departure from professional development. Rather, they’re building cognitive capacity you can’t get from frameworks and bullet points.
Build reading into your organization. Consider starting a leadership book club. Not for “key takeaways” but for discussion, disagreement, and sitting with questions that don’t have easy answers. Reading is a solo act, but talking about a book is communal, and that’s where critical thinking sharpens.
Protect the time. Twenty-three books isn’t a lot. It’s less than two a month, but it’s more books than I’ve read in years. I didn’t suddenly find extra hours. I just stopped giving them to Instagram. That space allowed reading to return. What you eliminate makes room for what matters.
The Leadership Imperative
Mary Oliver wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” In a world designed to fragment our attention, reading is a radical act. It’s how we practice thinking for ourselves.
AI will continue to augment how we work, helping us draft, summarize, analyze, generate. But the leaders who thrive will be those who can do what AI cannot: sit with ambiguity, ask the questions that haven’t been asked, understand what it feels like to be someone else, and craft a narrative that moves people to action.
Twenty-three books didn’t make me more productive. They made me a better thinker. In an AI world, that’s the edge that matters.