Christine Seifert recalls a time in her life when she felt guilty for reading fiction.
Dr Seifert, a professor of communication at Westminster College, felt she should have been learning about real people and events, and reading non-fiction like biographies or autobiographies, instead.
But that began to change when she discovered that fiction wasn’t just a form of self-indulgence.
She learnt that reading was, in fact, doing something beneficial to her brain that non-fiction didn’t.
And when harnessed, she says that can be a huge asset, particularly in the workplace.
Curious minds
Dr Seifert says there are several studies that demonstrate the perks of reading fiction and using our imagination, rather than digesting hard facts all the time.
Flexing your empathy muscle is one example.
“Fiction is asking us as readers to put ourselves in the shoes of another person, and I think one could argue that there is no non-fiction that does that,” Dr Seifert tells ABC RN’s This Working Life.
She says reading fiction, in particular literary fiction, can also help to hone critical thinking skills.
“Literary fiction tends to work your brain out the best … and that’s because literary fiction is asking you to think in ways that tend to be more complicated than genre fiction,” she says.
“Literary fiction asks us to think about things in ways that are far more difficult and perhaps more outside of our day-to-day understanding.”
How reading helps at work
Dr Seifert says there are benefits to reading any kind of fiction, and doing so can help us improve our focus in the workplace.
“What fiction does is ask us to keep an open mind for the course of an entire book, which is actually a really long time when you think about it,” she says.
“So it requires you to not have cognitive closure [wanting a clear, firm answer]. And I would argue that is something that we can bring into the workplace with us.”
Avid readers are also more likely to have higher levels of curiosity, says Meg Elkins, a senior lecturer in behavioural economics at the School of Economics at RMIT University.
Dr Elkins has researched the association between curiosity and science, maths and reading ability in Australians teenagers.
“What we found really interesting was that we knew that science [skill] was linked to curiosity, but reading was a little bit of a surprising one,” she says.
The study showed that the more these students read books, newspapers, or magazines, the higher they ranked for curiosity — a trait linked with innovation.
Dr Elkins also says reading “allows us to go into that place of calmness and wellbeing and explore new worlds”.
That’s something else she argues can help us in the workplace.
“If you want an employee that’s going to be looking at new ways of doing things or an employee that can engage empathically, we know that readers, particularly when they’re young, start to get greater levels of empathy because they relate to characters,” she says.
Wealthy readers
There’s much to be gained from reading non-fiction, too.
Tom Corley, an American accountant and financial planner, researched what some of his richest clients did in their daily lives.
In total, he interviewed 233 millionaires in the US over five years, which he’s written about in his book, Rich Habits.
The habit many millionaires had that caught him by surprise was reading.
“They committed a minimum of 30 minutes a day to reading non-fiction,” Mr Corley says.
“They were reading to learn; they were reading primarily about their career, their industry, that dream they were pursuing, anything about their company [and about] what they were doing to make money.”
For the most part, the millionaires he interviewed read autobiographies or biographies about successful people, particularly those related to their industry. Typically they read non-fiction before their workday began.
Make time
Dr Seifert says workplaces are beginning to recognise the positive impact that reading can have on their staff, something that is evident in the emergence of the workplace book club.
She hopes the book club trend is a growing one, and not just for the workplace benefits.
“Reading is one of the most important things we can do to build our brains,” she says.
“And yet, we say that we don’t have time to do it. I would say, we don’t have time to not do it.”
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