-Karthik Gurumurthy
We tend to judge leaders by what they do: the decisions they make, the results they deliver, the confidence they project. But perhaps one of the most revealing signs of a leader is something far quieter, something that happens out of view. It’s whether they still make room to learn.
Reading may be one of the clearest measures of that. A leader who has stopped reading has, in a sense, stopped listening, not to the people in the room but to the vast conversation of human thought that stretches across centuries. They have begun to rely only on what they already know, and what we already know, however valuable, is never enough.
Different kinds of books shape us in different ways. Fiction lets us live, for a while, inside someone else’s mind. We feel another person’s fears, see the world through unfamiliar eyes, and understand choices we might never make ourselves. For a leader, whose decisions shape the lives of others, that widening of empathy and imagination is no small gift.
Nonfiction sharpens a different part of us. It trains us to follow an argument, weigh evidence, and stay with a difficult idea long enough to truly understand it. In an age of headlines and quick summaries, the patient attention that serious reading demands has become rare, and therefore all the more valuable.
Francis Bacon wrote four centuries ago that reading makes a full person. Without that fullness, the mind slowly narrows. Not reading doesn’t feel like a loss from one day to the next, but over time it can lead to a kind of stagnation, a mind that circles the same thoughts, repeats the same assumptions, and mistakes familiarity for wisdom.
At its heart, reading is an act of humility. To open a book is to admit that someone else may know something we don’t. Socrates was said to be the wisest man in Athens precisely because he recognized how little he knew. The leader who reads carries that same spirit, an awareness that their understanding is incomplete and a willingness to keep filling it.
The leader who stops reading often carries the opposite assumption, perhaps unspoken: that experience alone is enough, that they have already learned what they need. Experience is a powerful teacher, but it’s also a narrow one. It teaches only what we ourselves have lived. Books let us borrow the experience of thousands of others: their successes, their failures, and the lessons they paid dearly to learn.
Many leaders say they simply don’t have time to read. Their days are full and their schedules crowded. That’s often true. Yet time, in the end, is a reflection of priorities. We find time for what we believe matters. To say “I don’t have time to read” is often to say, without quite meaning to, “I don’t see learning as part of my work.”
The wisest leaders see it differently. For them, reading isn’t a luxury taken from the work of leading. It’s part of the work itself, the quiet preparation that makes good judgment possible. Ideas absorbed in solitude often reappear at the very moment they’re needed: in a difficult conversation, a complex decision, or a moment of crisis.
Perhaps that’s the deeper truth. Leadership isn’t only about guiding others forward. It’s also about continuing to grow oneself. A leader who keeps learning keeps growing, and a leader who keeps growing helps everyone around them grow too.
Leave a Reply