I learned so much from reading. Which sparks ideas. Try it. That’s really the whole thesis, and I could stop right there, but the old ad line deserves better than a one-sentence drive-by. Reading Is Fundamental was a public service campaign decades before anyone worried about attention spans and doom-scrolling, and it turns out the slogan undersold itself. Reading isn’t just fundamental to literacy. It’s fundamental to how professionals think, argue, negotiate, and eventually distinguish themselves from everyone else doing the same job the same way.
Books in particular do something a headline or a hot take cannot. A good book gives you the long version, the reasoning behind the conclusion, the mistakes the author made getting there. That is where ideas actually come from. Not from information alone, but from watching someone else’s thinking unfold across three hundred pages. You absorb a way of approaching problems, and one day it surfaces in a client meeting as an idea nobody else in the room had, because nobody else in the room had read that book. Magazines and blogs do their own version of this on a shorter timeline, but books ask more of you, and they give more back.
There’s a professional payoff here too, beyond the ideas themselves. Reading gives you something to talk about with people who are not talking about the same three things everyone else is talking about. Walk into a room able to reference something you read last month, and you become memorable in a way that “how about this weather” never accomplishes. Clients remember the lawyer who connected their situation to something from outside the practice of law. It costs you nothing but the reading itself, and it pays you back in relationships and reputation.
None of this needs to be homework. Some of the best reading you can do has nothing to do with sharpening your professional edge at all. Pick up a novel, a memoir, something with no obvious application to your caseload or your quarterly numbers, and let it pull you away from work for an hour. That distance is its own kind of value, separate from whatever idea might come out of it later. So read the dense industry book if that’s what the moment calls for but read the paperback that has nothing to do with your job too. Reading is fundamental precisely because it works on you in ways you can’t predict and can’t force. You just must keep doing it and let it find you when you need it.
As always, this post and others can be found on my blog, Business Law Guy.