Have you been spending more time reading LinkedIn articles than books lately? Keeping up with your newsletters over your bookshelf? Hey, I get it - I think we’ve all been there, especially in today’s working environment.
Instead of novels, we start reading documentation. Instead of stories, we read articles, whitepapers, case studies, and industry reports. The books on our nightstands slowly become leadership books, productivity books, or books about strategy.
All of which are useful, of course.
But something interesting happens when fiction falls away entirely, because fiction exercises a different type of thinking than most professional reading does. Professional reading tends to be analytical, it focuses on extracting lessons, frameworks, tactics, and ideas that can be applied directly to work.
Fiction does something else entirely.
It trains your brain to think about systems, incentives, unintended consequences, and people interacting in complex ways.
Which is why I’ve started to suspect that reading fiction might actually be surprisingly helpful preparation for the world we’re currently stepping into, especially as AI becomes more embedded in how we work.
When Technology Looks Like Magic
One of the best examples of this idea is a novella called Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which revolves around an anthropologist from an advanced civilization studying a medieval society.
The technology he uses is completely normal to him, but to the people around him it appears indistinguishable from magic.
From his perspective, he’s simply using tools. From their perspective, he’s performing wizardry. The entire story is essentially two worldviews colliding.
Sound familiar? I think that’s exactly how a lot of people experience AI tools today. If you’ve spent time learning how they work, experimenting with them, understanding the structure underneath, you know there’s logic involved. There are patterns, inputs, prompts, and feedback loops shaping the outcome.
But if you encounter these tools from the outside, they can feel almost mythical.
Another book that gave me this same feeling recently was Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett, which revolves around a form of magic called “scriving,” where characters rewrite the rules an object believes about reality.
You inscribe commands onto an object, and if the instructions are convincing enough, the object behaves differently.
A door might believe it is unlocked.
A wheel might believe gravity works in another direction.
And while reading it, I kept having the slightly strange thought that this felt very similar to how prompting works.
You experiment with language, refine the instructions, adjust how you frame the request until the outcome improves.
In other words, fiction had already created a mental model for understanding something that didn’t fully exist yet.
If You Fell Out of the Habit
Ok, so maybe starting a company book club is too much work right now (fair enough!)
If you used to read fiction and haven’t in years, which happens to many of us once work reading takes over, it might be worth experimenting with bringing it back into the rotation.
A few easy ways to do that:
Start with novellas or shorter books, something you can finish in a few evenings.
Revisit a genre you loved earlier in life, even if it feels slightly nostalgic.
Keep a book visible near where you relax, so it’s easier to reach than your phone.
Don’t worry about reading “important” books - the goal is curiosity, not productivity.
Try audiobooks during walks or commutes, which can bring stories back into your routine.
You might find that it doesn’t take long for the habit to return.
And once it does, you may notice that fiction isn’t just entertainment, it quietly gives you another lens for thinking about systems, technology, and how people interact inside them.
Have a book recommendation of your own? Send it my way!
