This 8 min. read saves you up to 59 hours
For your knowledge advantage, we put together the most actionable insights from 15 getAbstract summaries (11 books with a total of 2944 pages, one article, 2 videos and one podcast) on this topic. If you did this work yourself, you would be busy for at least 3525 minutes (about 59 hours). Learn more.

Reading Boosts Your Performance. Seriously.

The benefits of reading go beyond mere knowledge acquisition.

Reading Boosts Your Performance. Seriously.

Readers keep learning – about lots of things. And you never know when the new knowledge you acquire will come in handy. By reading a lot, you will be better equipped to tackle the many unforeseen challenges life throws at you and stay agile in your career.

“Knowledge is the new money,” learning entrepreneur and best-selling author Michael Simmons argues. Workers who prioritize knowledge acquisition over money acquisition will win out in the end. A busy schedule is no excuse not to read and learn: Former US president Barack Obama dedicated one hour a day to reading. Microsoft founder Bill Gates and legendary investor Warren Buffett are also known to be prolific readers. 

Image of: 5-Hour Rule
Article Summary

5-Hour Rule

Continuous learning is the only way to stay afloat in the new knowledge economy.

Michael Simmons Medium
Read Summary

Not convinced yet that reading is worth your time? Here are five ways in which reading can boost your job performance:

1. Reading Boosts Your Concentration

Pop-ups, team chats and phone messages: Constant interruptions are hurting our attention span. Researchers have found that constant interruptions take a toll on our cognitive functions. Moreover, people habituated to frequent interruptions also self-interrupt more often.

Image of: Pardon the Interruptions
Podcast Summary

Pardon the Interruptions

What if technology could liberate instead of hijack human attention?

Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin and Gloria Mark Center for Humane Technology
Read Summary

Yet the ability to focus is essential for and central to knowledge work. To use Cal Newport’s phrase, “deep work” helps you reach better results. Our ability to focus is like a muscle. It can be trained with deliberate practice. Reading is a great way to build up your concentration span. Start with 10 minutes of uninterrupted reading, and gradually extend your reading time.

Image of: Deep Work
Book Summary

Deep Work

You don’t succeed by answering emails quickly. You succeed by regularly practicing deep work.

Cal Newport Grand Central
Read Summary

A 2005 comparative study conducted among students was able to demonstrate a strong link between reading skills and attention span. Reading strengthens your ability to focus because it is neurologically more demanding than speech or image processing. As Ken Pugh, director of Haskins Laboratories at Yale University explains, reading forces several brain areas to work together, including brain areas associated with vision, language and associative learning.

Reading also affords greater concentration because it prompts your brain to generate a narrative and boosts your imagination, Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA, explains. Also, reading enables you to pause and reflect at any time, which allows you to engage with the content more deeply than if you just listened to an audiobook.

Image of: Reader, Come Home
Book Summary

Reader, Come Home

Why reading is important for children and the world.

Maryanne Wolf Harper 360
Read Summary

2. Reading Reduces Stress

We can all use a quick and effective technique to boost stress. Turns out, you don’t need to schedule a massage or attend a yoga class to calm down your nervous system. Just picking up something to read will do the trick.

A study conducted by the University of Sussex in the UK found that reading for just six minutes – the length of a short getAbstract summary (!) – reduces stress levels by more than two-thirds.

Image of: Unwind!
Book Summary

Unwind!

“Unwind” your stress by taking charge of your response to it.

Michael Olpin and Sam Bracken Grand Harbor Press
Read Summary

Reading brings down stress levels faster than going for a walk or listening to music because it forces your concentration, prompting the body to release unnecessary tensions in the muscles and heart. By the way, that’s also why many find reading before bed helps them go to sleep faster.

3. Reading Makes You a More Effective Communicator

In a hybrid and remote work environment, it’s no longer the person with the loudest voice who will win. It’s the person with the best idea, articulated concisely and clearly, who will grab people’s attention. Your word and sentence choices are what you will be judged by. Whether you are writing an email, report or a chat message, you will want to engage your audience so people keep reading – and understand precisely what you want to say.

You set yourself up for success by honing your writing skills, and reading is a great way to do so. For one, it helps you expand your vocabulary. This is particularly significant for non-native English speakers navigating an English-speaking remote work environment. For another, reading lets you absorb the writing style of other (hopefully) skilled writers. For this type of learning to work, however, you would want to focus on the same types of writing you wish to get better at.

4. Reading Strengthens Your Empathy

Soft skills are increasingly important in a technologically advanced workplace. One key soft skill is empathy – the ability to put yourself into other people’s shoes. This is particularly important now that the workplace has become highly diverse. Being able to work together effectively with people from different generations and cultures, backgrounds and sexual orientations is an essential career skill.

Image of: Wired to Care
Book Summary

Wired to Care

Why empathetic companies do well…or why act like you have a reptilian should be reptilian brain when your customers are all heart?

Dev Patnaik FT Press
Read Summary

Reading literary fiction and biographies, in particular, offers opportunities to step outside yourself and your familiar life circumstances. It transports you into another person’s mind and see and feel what they do.

A 2006 study found that frequent fiction readers are better able to understand people in the actual world. Frequent fiction readers are also better at gauging other people’s thoughts and emotions through visual cues, the study found.

Related Summaries in getAbstract’s Library
Image of: Emotional Intelligence
Book Summary

Emotional Intelligence

Your IQ is only 20% of your success. Emotions play a much bigger role. How do you feel about that?

Daniel Goleman Bantam Read Summary
Image of: The Self-Aware Leader
Book Summary

The Self-Aware Leader

Leaders without self-awareness often fail. To succeed, they must quickly learn who and what they are.

John C. Maxwell HarperCollins Leadership Read Summary
Image of: Emotions: Facts vs. Fiction
Video Summary

Emotions: Facts vs. Fiction

Do you think you can read other people’s emotions? Think again.

Lisa Feldman Barrett Rotman Institute of Philosophy Read Summary

5. Reading Increases Your Creativity

Reading exposes you to different worlds, ideas and perspectives. Reading keeps the mind agile – which comes in handy during a brainstorming session. Connect what you’ve learned during a reading session to what you already know and – boom! – a new idea is born.

While ever-smarter computers take over more and more routine tasks, fresh ideas and imagination will still need to come from human beings. In both 2019 and 2020, LinkedIn ranked creativity as the most in-demand soft skill for companies. Over 80% of companies connect creativity with strong business results.

Creativity involves connecting seemingly unrelated dots to generate new solutions. The broader your knowledge base (which reading helps to build), the more dots you will have at your disposal.

Another prerequisite for Eureka moments is having an open mind, which reading, by exposing you to new ideas, helps foster. The ability to imagine something that does not (yet) exist is another trait that creative people and avid fiction readers have in common.

Related Summaries in getAbstract’s Library
Image of: Imagination Is a Creative Superpower
Video Summary

Imagination Is a Creative Superpower

Embrace the power of imagination and discover new possibilities for your life, work and relationships.

Ashley C. Ford 99U Read Summary
Image of: The Creative Mindset
Book Summary

The Creative Mindset

Unlocking individual creativity supercharges innovation.

Staney DeGraff and Jeff DeGraff Berrett-Koehler Publishers Read Summary
Image of: Out of Our Minds
Book Summary

Out of Our Minds

Cultivating creativity at school and work builds crucial skills for tackling today’s complex challenges.

Ken Robinson Capstone Read Summary
Image of: The Creativity Leap
Book Summary

The Creativity Leap

Find the intersection of analytics and creativity to increase creative intelligence in your workplace.

Natalie Nixon Berrett-Koehler Publishers Read Summary
Image of: The Creative Thinking Handbook
Book Summary

The Creative Thinking Handbook

Creativity is the power skill in today’s evolving business world.

Chris Griffiths Kogan Page Publishers Read Summary

Your reading does not need to be directly connected to your field of work. In fact, you will benefit if it isn’t – so feel free to pick up a book of fiction. As theoretical physicist Tom McLeish explains, creative imagination underpins all great scientific breakthroughs. Science involves reimagining nature in a way that is similar to the ways novelists create fictional worlds, while scientific and artistic creativity both elicit similar emotions. 

Image of: The Poetry and Music of Science
Book Summary

The Poetry and Music of Science

The failure to acknowledge the role of creativity in science keeps people from pursuing it as a career.

Tom McLeish Oxford UP
Read Summary

A piece of fiction can reveal themes that relate to the workplace and your life in general. If picking up a piece of classic literature seems daunting, getAbstract’s Literary Classics summaries offer a great entryway into the world of great fiction writing. In her column, Literary Classics editor Heather Hodel explains how literary themes apply to contemporary challenges.

How getAbstract Can Help Boost Performance Through Reading

An independent survey commissioned by getAbstract found that getAbstract subscribers purchase twice as many books as non-subscribers. Most subscribers said they feel inspired to dig into specific books after reading the respective summary on getAbstract.com. Survey participants also indicated that they feel more informed and successful in the job by having a resource like the getAbstract library at hand.

getAbstract subscribers can reap all five benefits of reading outlined in this post. Here is how:

  1. Concentration – If you don’t yet have an established reading habit, start small. Build up your attention muscles by carving out 10 minutes of concentrated reading and reflection per day. Start with our article summaries (which are shorter than full-length articles and will take you less than 10 minutes to read), and gradually extend your reading time to tackle book summaries. (Learn more about the power of habits here.) 
  2. Stress reduction – It takes only six minutes of reading to reduce stress. That’s one short summary! By downloading the getAbstract app, you will have a stress buster at your fingertips.
  3. Communication – Our summaries don’t beat around the bush. They use concise, easy-to-understand language to get the point across. Internalize the craft of concise summary writing by reading our summaries.
  4. Empathy – If reading an entire novel feels intimidating, give our Literary Classics summaries a try! Or expand your empathy by delving into one of our summarized biographies. Of course, you can always check out our Emotional Intelligence channel to learn more about this important skill.
  5. Creativity –The range of topics covered by the getAbstract library is extremely broad – on purpose! Pick out summaries on topics outside your area of specialization. This will help you make new connections and come up with fresh ideas. Three channel recommendations to start off with: History of Science, Society and Decision-Making.
How the Journal Saves You Time
Reading Time
8 min.
Reading time for this article is about 8 minutes.
Saved Time
59 h
This article saves you up to 59 hours of research and reading time.
Researched Abstracts
15 We have curated the most actionable insights from 15 summaries for this feature.
2 2 Videos
1 1 Podcast
1 1 Article
11 We read and summarized 11 books with 2944 pages for this article.
Share this Story