This article was first published in The Clarity Journal, our WyeWorks newsletter on leadership, uncertainty, and the craft of self-management. If you’d like to receive new editions as they come out, you can subscribe below.
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I used to hate reading…
It baffled me that others enjoyed it. Hours spent turning pages? Seemed like a waste of time.
Today I know I was wrong. Reading became essential to my life. I wouldn’t say I’m passionate about it the way someone loves video games or their favorite sport, but I discovered that reading is a way to know myself better—one I’d be foolish to ignore now.
The key word: discovered. It captures something that shows up every time I change…
In adolescence, when the party scene started, drinking alcohol was an end in itself. It was new, fun, made you feel interesting in the group. No convincing that version of Rodri otherwise. You could bring him scientific studies, disaster stories, rational arguments—he’d still do it. Tell you that you were crazy.
Today, Rodri would say you were right. That drinking that much was foolish, that we didn’t know better. But for 15-year-old Rodri, it all made sense. Time and experience led him to see alcohol differently.
Reading works the same way. If you’re where I was—where books mean nothing—I can’t turn you into a literature enthusiast. Even with a thousand reasons to read, you won’t feel what I feel… until you experience it yourself.
My best contribution is perspective: telling you what a book means to me and how reading enriched my life. Not to change your relationship with books, but to sharpen your intuition, so when it speaks, you hear it clearer.
Because essentially, a book is this: a human being spending years wrestling with an idea that touches them deeply. It has to be that way—nobody invests that much effort in something that doesn’t matter to them. What matters at that level, what lights a spark and pulls you down a rabbit hole of curiosity, always comes with internal transformation:
I used to think this way → I discovered something → now I think this way.
Maybe it’s a novel where the protagonist fights for acceptance, reflecting the author’s own life. Or a habits book that exists because the writer needed to change how they lived. Every book is a capsule of perspective.
When we read, we access someone else’s transformation: how they think, what they saw, what clicked, how they changed. Witnessing thousands of others’ transformations helps us find our own. That’s invaluable, because life is exactly that: discovering and knowing yourself.
That’s my relationship with reading today.
Yours, if it hasn’t appeared yet, might be waiting to be discovered. And if it already has—maybe it’s time to pick up the next book.
— Rodrigo
Clarity & Leadership at WyeWorks.
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