Real Growth Through Fiction

Let Your Reading Be Your Guide

A recent article by Ayodeji Awosika made some very relevant points that can come about from many of the books one finds in any self-help library, including his own. I don’t have any arguments about the specific points within the selection of books; the article just made me consider the overemphasis of the self-help market as a singularly useful category of advice. I think the narrow collection of published works overall considered in this marketing category sells many of us short because it narrows the definition of self-help to that of being told what to do or think, rather than focusing on the doing as a result of our most powerful learning tools: discovering new experiences and reflecting on what those mean to us.

Reflection is essential for deep, context-inclusive learning. Much of the recent writing on reflection focuses on younger learners — possibly because of the sudden shift to learning from home. However, reflection is essential for adults as well. Beyond simple academic learning, reflection for adults is critical to developing coping skills and developing interconnected meanings among seemingly disparate concepts.

To me, self-help means helping oneself, and that entails much more reflection and consideration of our direction and values — looking at what we are and what we ought — than trying to follow or change a roadmap provided by someone else. To help ourselves, we have to understand ourselves, understand others, and be open to learning from all of our experiences, not just those prescribed for learning. To that end, I offer this perspective on three of the main reasons we should leverage reading fiction as a learning and reflection tool to improve our personal and professional lives.

Table of Contents

· Strategic Imagination: Fiction Expands Your View of the Possible ∘ Imagination Is a Strategic Resource ∘ Lack of Imagination Kills · Dive into Fiction! It’s Good For Your Career! ∘ Why Not Just Catch A Movie? ∘ Specific Book Recommendations for Empathy · Reading Fiction to Learn About Ourselves · Final Thoughts

Strategic Imagination: Fiction Expands Your View of the Possible

One of the greatest strengths of fiction is that it isn’t bound by the events that are real or historical in our own world. Indeed, fiction genres can stretch from simple tweaks of what we experience as everyday life (i.e., the whole Slice of Life genre) to endlessly divergent and speculative worlds of creatures never seen and technologies scarcely imagined.

Importantly, considering these expanded boundaries helps us think about the options and opportunities in our own world. Because we get to add whole universes of experience to our perspectives, we expand the likelihood we will make novel connections with elements in our reality that allow us to recognize unusual risks or cultivate unheard-of opportunities.

I teach graduate classes in project risk management, especially considering the types and sources of risk; students must think beyond merely daily experiences because work environments, practices, and templates create artificial thinking fences that are difficult to scale without practice. I find that my students who seldom dive into any sort of fiction have difficulty imagining what probabilistic detriments (risks) and advantages (opportunities) could happen in projects that aren’t spelled out in the plan. For example, when considering a project to revamp a bus stop near a housing subdivision, students can always identify risks of injuries due to traffic or challenges with the adjacent community. Low-fiction students fail to see real-world risks such as labor strikes and machinery problems if they aren’t already in the scenario narrative. Low-fiction students have challenges connecting a problem with the project budget (an obvious number right in the worksheet) with the contributions of the bad estimates or incorrect assumptions that created it (not on the worksheet).

Imagination Is a Strategic Resource

Deep down, we’re talking about developing the imagination necessary to deal with personal and professional challenges. Imagination is the ability to plan and adapt based on predictable-but-not-realized realities. By definition, anything that allows us to plan for the future, especially the months or years ahead, is strategic; planning with figurative scenarios and conditions requires strategic imagination. A Harvard Business Review (HBR) article from last year, filed under Crisis Management, characterizes imagination as:

… the capacity to create, evolve, and exploit mental models of things or situations that don't yet exist…

While the HBR article explains what organizations may do to encourage or enable imagination in groups, it leaves out anything that individuals may do independently. Unfortunately, extrapolating from reading and experiences to apply conceptual circumstances is a highly individualized strength. Individualized because we cannot share in real-time the imagined world that exists in our own minds. Yes, we can explain and answer questions — which is where the power of a group comes in — but nobody can see in their minds what we see in ours. Where groups can draw on the imagination of individuals as a catalyst to better and more thorough analysis and team modeling, the spark still comes from single imaginative minds within the whole.

Lack of Imagination Kills

Consider the risks to long-term projects such as sociopolitical upheavals and pandemics. The fact that these things can happen is known and well-documented in disaster planning media. Still, that COVID-19 apparently caught so many companies off guard indicates that they somehow failed to recognize that a previously identified and highly-studied phenomenon could impact their projects and operations. Former Director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response (PHPR) indicated that the poor pandemic response was something that had every reason to be better but was not. Despite having all the resources, money, and knowledge necessary to fight the pandemic early and save hundreds of thousands of lives just in America, Ali S. Khan indicated that the failure of the response to the pandemic was largely a failure of imagination. A lack of imagination — the inability to conceive a situation that wasn’t already obvious and present in the minds of those in charge of the response — leads directly to the sociopolitical avalanche of death and economic ruin we see today.

Dive into Fiction! It’s Good For Your Career!

In one way or another, we’re bombarded with messages about embracing the grind and that we must curate our time and attention steadily toward our goals; we must cut or reduce any distractions down to an absolute minimum if we are going to succeed. Labor is in; leisure is out. If we want to entertain ourselves and get our fiction fix, we better catch a quick movie and skip the book altogether.

The irony here is that those who eschew the reading of fiction as the pursuit of trivial entertainment while at the same time exclaiming the virtues of emotional intelligence (EQ) in workplace success. I’m not sure if this is a misunderstanding of reading, or fiction, or EQ, but folks seem to forget that empathy is a major component of EQ. One of the only proven ways to develop empathy is by immersing oneself in the sort of character-rich stories that are the backbone of fiction. To wit, reading fiction directly contributes to improving EQ and workplace success.

Why Not Just Catch A Movie?

Movies are not completely useless in this EQ arena, but it’s important to understand where they fail us. You see, there are actually three components of empathy that interest us, and we need to develop them all:

• Cognitive Empathy: The ability to understand the feelings of others in a detached, intellectual way.
• Emotional (affective) Empathy: The ability to feel the emotions of others as if they are our own.
• Compassion (helping behavior) Empathy: The capacity to respond to our perceptions of the emotional state of others; to take action on what they feel.

When researchers mapped some of the impacts of fiction on our empathy components, they found clear relationships between the consumer's immersion levels improved. Mere exposure to fiction, such as watching a movie, has a measurable impact on our cognitive empathy, but not the other two. The reasons are simple: movies are relatively short, shallow, and focused on moving scenes forward rather than connecting deeply with the characters and their emotional states. The perspective of watching an emotional display automatically puts us into a third-person view that conceptually breaks us away from the characters we are observing in a way that locks us into an observation-only role. This role then disallows us to feel what they are feeling.

Reading fiction gives us the prolonged exposure to the characters and their inner thoughts and stresses to get the experience's deeper immersion benefits. By transporting ourselves into the story to a point where we know what the characters are thinking and feeling, we feel we are part of the experience rather than mere observers. Such transportation enhances our emotional/affective empathy and compassion empathy (i.e., helping behavior).

Keep in mind that the importance is in the immersion into the story and the characters, so audiobooks can work as long as they aren’t merely background noise. To gain from immersion, you must immerse, which means you are paying attention and are absorbed in the story. Additionally, if you have the ability to do so, pen-and-paper role-playing games (e.g., Dungeons & Dragons) can facilitate the necessary immersion to improve empathy. Needless to say, computer games suffer the same weakness as movies, but for slightly different reasons. Computer games force us to focus on the mechanics and often artificially discrete goals rather than the feelings of the characters, so we’re back to being an observer again, and that’s only if the story writing is actually any good. Please comment if you know of any games with stories so immersive that the game mechanics and interface peculiarities are easily forgotten.

Note: Reading fiction also helps social cognition, which helps with many other aspects of our relationships and interactions that fall somewhat under the umbrella of EQ.

Specific Book Recommendations for Empathy

While it isn’t essential to include a list of books related to expanded possibilities, I feel it is constructive to have some good examples to start when specifically exploring to improve empathy. I have read or listened to somewhere around 50 books per year over the last decade, so I can’t possibly provide an exhaustive list of books that I’ve read that I like or didn’t like concerning their contribution to developing empathy. To get you started, however, here are three that I recommend a lot for the benefit they provide for empathy, in no particular order:

• Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein): First, this is nothing like the 1997 movie or any of its sequels, and I guarantee you’ll never look at any of these movies the same way after you read the book. The only thing the film has in common with the book is a loose setting and a common title, and a few context-abused quotes. The book is an entirely different story. Concerning empathy, this Starship Troopers allows you to stick with the main character through a series of personal and professional life events, and to learn to understand his thoughts and the influences that got him to where he is at that point.
• Old Man’s War (John Scalzi): This is the first book of a series, and I recommend the whole series, which follows a retiree who transitions to an entirely new life right at the start. I like this book from the empathy perspective because it gives you the chance to see someone with truly different experiences than those around him at certain points — though some of those experiences may be familiar to us — and you get to experience the difference his uniqueness (and some old baggage, at one point) brings to many interactions and conflicts.
• World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Complete Edition) (Max Brooks): Like Starship Troopers, this book has nothing in common with the film other than a loose setting and a title. This collection of stories takes us on a windy-but-coherent journey through different phases of a global disaster by capturing the first-person testimony of people who experienced or even caused some of the key events. Empathizing with the characters and their lived experience is the point of this book, and each is a rich portrayal of the person involved; even the narrator is someone you can connect with. I recommend the audiobook over the print version because it is a full-cast recording with Alan Alda, Martin Scorsese, Mark Hamill, and others, so each character is realized vividly in their expression and pacing in a way that we might miss in print. On a side note, I mention and link the Complete Edition here because the audiobook was originally released as an abridged version that leaves out some great content; always get the complete or unabridged book.

Reading Fiction to Learn About Ourselves

The final tip for today on reading fiction for self-improvement is to consider how you react to the fiction you read. Whether you’re reading to expand your horizons or reading in pursuit of empathy, pay attention to the emotional responses you have concerning what you are reading. If, for example, you feel a revulsion to a specific character in a story, make a note of that feeling and spend a little effort trying to figure out why you are experiencing that reaction. Does the ogre about to confront the protagonist remind some part of you about the bully you knew in grade school? Is the speech pattern of the shifty shopkeeper reminiscent of someone who owes you money? Consider what these reactions mean to you and how they affect your perception of the characters and decisions in that scene and following scenes.

This skill is instrumental in our modern, click-bait-filled world. Much of media these days is contrived to take advantage of our emotional triggers to keep us clicking deeper into an informational rabbit hole. For some, the algorithms and content filters are certainly intentional. However, for others, it may simply be an artifact of the need to sell to a market growing accustomed to fear-based headlines or just that unusual things are newsworthy where common occurrences are not. When we recognize an emotional response, we know to disconnect and disengage from this trap rather than pursue ideas and answers that proceed farther from true or even sane.

Final Thoughts

In my opinion, you should read all sorts of books and such that you enjoy, not just those in some narrow marketing category. When you read, dive deep into the stories and the people, and truly escape for a while if that is your intent; be immersed in all that is happening on the page and in your mind’s eye. When you return from that journey, take some time to consider the path you took and what it means, how the characters learned and grew, and how you felt about that process. Observe when and where the character’s emotions resonated with you and where they felt strange; there can be clues here about your own positions and assumptions about the world. Consider that even transient fictional experience is life experience, and you can and should learn and grow from it.