Wednesday
Yesterday I wrote about how literature lovers, going back to the Greeks and the Romans, have felt the need to defend literature on practical grounds. To follow up, I report today on an article by one Stephanie Vozza of Fast Company that lists “Five Ways Reading Fiction Makes You Better at Your Job.”
The first three are related and have to do with the complexities of dealing with people:
1. Enhanced Reasoning Skills
Vozza quotes University of Puget Sound’s Michael Benveniste, an English Professor, pointing out how “reading fiction can give you insights that help you work beyond logic.” Beneveniste explains that fiction “offers a space for speculating about the constitutive role that ‘fuzzy’ values like beliefs, norms, and experiences play in social contexts.”
The problems we encounter often have a bewildering number of complexities, including people’s emotions and past histories. A familiarity with literature can help us wend our way through this labyrinth.
2. Understanding of Complex Problems
Vozza quotes a New York Times article quoting psychology professor Keith Oatley of the University of Toronto that reading fiction is like using a computer simulation for people issues, just as one uses simulations to learn how to fly a plane or forecast the weather. As with such simulations, in fiction one encounters “complex characters and circumstances that we might not encounter in daily life.”
3. Empathy
Given the importance of empathy in business, fiction is indispensable. Vozza quotes York University’s Raymond Mar:
Experiences that we have in our life shape our understanding of the world…and imagined experiences through narrative fiction stories are also likely to shape or change us…Even though fiction is fabricated, it can communicate truths about human psychology and relationships.
4. Stress Relief
This I knew instinctively but not scientifically: according to cognitive neuropsychologist David Lewis of Sussex University, reading a novel relieves stress better than listening to music, taking a walk or having a cup of tea. Lewis found that “[j]ust six minutes of reading lowered participants’ heart rate and eased tension in the muscles.”
Lewis adds that reading isn’t “merely a distraction” but “an active engaging of the imagination as the words on the printed page stimulate your creativity and cause you to enter what is essentially an altered state of consciousness.”
5. Strong Role Models
The power of channeling an exemplary literary character cannot be underestimated. My entrepreneur son Darien says that he has on occasion turned to the words of Henry V–“Once more into the breach, dear friends”–when he needs to muster up his courage to approach a client or undertake a new enterprise. I’m sure you have your own examples.
To be sure, there are other ways to develop these skills and find these resources. But in literature they all come wrapped up together. And you have fun at the same time. Or as Horace puts it,
The aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together, in what he says, both pleasure and applicability to life.
