CN07: On Reading and Being Read

There was a stretch of time when I could read three books a week.

When my biggest decision was which stack to pull from next.

When my brain felt like a well-fed animal, stretching out in the sun.

I miss that version of myself. The one who marinated in other people’s ideas. The one who had time to think beautiful, useless thoughts.

Now I am learning in a completely different way. Not from pages, but from people. Not from theories, but from truths spoken directly to me, sometimes with hesitation, sometimes with heat.

People look at me with a mixture of curiosity and caution.

Who are you?

What are you here to change?

How long are you staying?

Are you safe?

This is not passive learning. This is learning that looks back.

No highlighting, no margin notes, no clean conclusions. Just real humans revealing the limits of my assumptions in real time. Someone tells me a story and I realize I am not just hearing it. I am being asked to hold it, to understand it, to respond to it.

Someone else pushes back, not rudely, just honestly and I feel the jolt of it. The little ego sting. The reminder that leadership is not performance. Leadership is receiving information you did not ask for and making something useful out of it.

My work now is listening. Not the polite kind. The kind where you hear the unsaid thing and the said thing and the thing they wish they could say but do not know how yet.

My work is filtering. My work is deciding what matters and what needs to wait. My work is watching people watch me, and slowly, slowly, catching the shift when skepticism becomes maybe.

I miss the books. But books never looked at me like this. Books never tested whether I could hold their stories with care. Books never needed me back.

This learning is harder. Less glamorous. Far more demanding.

But it is also intimate in a way reading never was. People are teaching me how to do this job simply by letting me into their lives.

Every conversation is a lesson. Every question is an invitation. Every moment of trust is a tiny revolution.

And maybe this is the whole point. Not to be well-read but to be well-received.