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 never owe a book more than 50 pages

(0:00) Why Business People Stopped Reading Fiction

(2:54) The Best-Selling Business Books Are Secretly Fiction

(5:51) What Reading Does to Your Lifespan and Focus

(10:08) Fiction Improves Your Empathy

(13:45) How to Read 50 Books a Year

(18:52) Five Sci-Fi Gateways

(22:41) Historical Fiction

(23:51) Easy Reading

(26:49) The Challenge: One Book, 50 Pages

The 10 books:

Sci-fi - Dark Matter (Blake Crouch), The Martian and Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir), Ready Player One (Ernest Cline), Wool (Hugh Howey)

Historical fiction - Gates of Fire (Steven Pressfield), The Alice Network (Kate Quinn)

Great, easy-reading fiction - For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway), Down River (John Hart), Beartown (Fredrik Backman)

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