My reading journey started quite late in life. I was that kid in the 1990s and 2000s who had never read Harry Potter. And for much of my early career I was learning by doing – hacking away with the assistance of friends, Google and Stack Overflow. I was making (and breaking) things in production. It was while stepping into a leadership role for the first time that I felt I could no longer afford to lean as much on trial and error. So the search for other means of learning began, and as the saying goes, seek and ye shall find…

A colleague had left a copy of Good to Great on her desk (for folks like myself to stumble upon I presume). Jim Collins begins the book by crediting it to his team of researchers before taking responsibility for any shortcomings. In awe of Jim Collins’ humility, I went on to read not only Good to Great, but other books in the series.

In Meditations, a book I found on a vast number of recommendation lists, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote that men are born to work together like a man’s two hands, feet or eyelids. To obstruct one another or fall angry is against Nature’s law.

In another oft recommended title, The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote 2000 years ago that the skillful warrior exploits potential energy – he does not hold his men responsible. The legendary general wrote:

On steep ground
They move;
Square, they halt;
Round, they roll.
Skillfully deployed soldiers
Are like round boulders
Rolling down
A mighty mountainside.

It is passages like these that got me hooked. I cannot recall which was the first passage that I read, whether one of the above or a passage from another title entirely. What is of significance though is the realization that accompanied these passages: why falter away on my own when I could be learning from the likes of men who had led armies and empires? In the words of one of the greatest authors of all time, Leo Tolstoy:

I cannot understand how some people can live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on Earth?

It would not have been a bad idea to have started reading books earlier. As the first decade of my professional career is coming to a close, I can count reading books as one of the most important takeaways from this period. I have found it to add value not just to how I lead, but to every aspect in my personal and professional life.