I want to get one thing out of the way early. I hate Atlas Shrugged. I don’t think Ayn Rand could be described as a “good writer”, no matter how many books she sold. Her characters are one-dimensional and cartoonish, her philosophy blunt, and the morality of her backwards world incompatible with ours.

Yet – and hear me out – I’m glad I read it.

Because it’s necessary to read things we disagree with, if we want to understand the world better – and if we want to continue to learn and grow throughout our lives.

I shrugged too

A friend recommended I read Rand to see whether her objectivist philosophy resonated with me. I was in my early 20s – that kind of age where the right book at the right time can have a profound effect on your worldview. To name a few: The Bell Jar, Catcher in the Rye, Man’s Search for Meaning, The Origins of Totalitarianism – any of these might ping a little switch and become a pillar of one’s own identity. I get it. People tattoo themselves with quotes from their favourite books and media, reminding them of the place in their hearts where those texts belong. 

Atlas Shrugged is also something of a marathon, like Infinite Jest – finishing the half-a-million-plus words is an achievement in itself worthy of some bragging rights. But that was the sole joy I got from Rand’s magnum opus: a sense of completion, and a nagging feeling that it had everything I didn’t want to see in the world. Except trains.

Knowing how others work

Rand’s objectivist philosophy, for all that it grated on me, is a kind of intellectual operating system for a certain class of business leader. I’ve heard that most Fortune 500 company leaders have read Atlas Shrugged, and that makes sense: When you see a business leader talk about ‘prime movers’, or position regulation as the enemy of progress, or describe self-interest as the highest moral good – they’re often, consciously or not, thinking in Rand’s language. They have a passion for driving change, and other considerations can justifiably be put to the side. Means, and ends.

So reading a book like this also gives incredible insights into how certain leaders and thinkers see the world. I may not agree with Rand wholesale, but I don’t have to, to appreciate how and why others do and understand how that might inform their worldview. 

That’s the point. Informed disagreement is a fundamentally different thing from uninformed dismissal. And the gap between them matters – personally, professionally, and, it turns out, neurologically.

The brain needs to work

There’s a really useful concept in learning sciences called “desirable difficulty”. It’s the idea that our brains actually consolidate understanding more effectively when they have to work for it.

That’s to say that easy, effortless reading or media feels good, but cognitively speaking, it’s not doing much. It might be appealing to read books (or find stats or watch movies) that confirm what we already think or are written by people we already agree with, but it’s the brain equivalent of driving an empty highway in ideal conditions: you don’t get much out of it. Nothing gets tested, or challenged, and as a result, you don’t grow.

To mix metaphors for a moment: a ship is safe in port, but that’s not what ships are for. 

When we engage with ideas (or activities) that push back and create a little productive discomfort, that’s where the deeper learning happens. The brain, faced with something it can’t immediately recognise, has to work harder. It has to create a new neural pathway to make sense of what it’s doing, and in so, grow. It takes energy. It can be uncomfortable. But that friction is how new understanding happens.

It’s easy to hold a view when nothing is challenging it, or you’re surrounding yourself in comfortable agreement. Doing the work of engaging with other thinking – not dismissing it, not being swept up in it, but actually sitting with it – is how you find out whether your thinking can hold its own.

A comfortable bookshelf

Optimistically, I could read maybe 2,500 books in the rest of my lifetime. Realistically, because life happens, that number is probably closer to 750. In either case, that’s both a lot of books and also nowhere near enough. So why would I give my limited reading time to ideas or authors I disagree with?

I adore Ray Bradbury’s writing. It’s stuffed with joy and ambition and love – no easy things to write. I try to re-read Fahrenheit 451 every other year. (It seems more and more prescient with each year: a dystopian society that’s turned away from critical thinking, is infatuated with mass media, and is increasingly lost in virtual worlds. Fahrenheit 451 came out in 1953.) And why wouldn’t I give my time to the writers who challenge me in directions I want to grow, and whose company I actually enjoy?

It’s a reasonable instinct. It’s also, taken too far, a kind of intellectual closing-down.

Yes, read the books and authors you enjoy, but don’t insulate yourself against the rest of the world. If your reading list is essentially a mirror, then you’re not really reading to learn. You’re reading to be soothed, and have your existing worldview confirmed back at you with increasing sophistication. That feels like growth, but it’s closer to comfort.

The alternative isn’t contrarianism. It’s not reading things you hate for the sake of suffering, or forcing yourself through books that offer nothing. You don’t have to give your money to the latest popular author who has gone out of their way to make the world a worse place. But you should be deliberate, and actively seek out the thinking that you find challenging – and engage with it seriously enough to understand it on its own terms before deciding what you think.

One of our writing clients shared with me that they’d started listening to podcasts hosted by people whose politics they found genuinely difficult. That’s an incredible move, and I have to commend them for it. They weren’t doing it to convert themselves, or confirm their worst assumptions about where those ideas lead. (A hate listen or watch or read can be satisfying, but hate is so boring.) Instead, it was to understand the internal logic of positions they instinctively rejected. It was often uncomfortable. But, they said, it was also one of the more clarifying intellectual exercises they’ve done.

When you understand how someone thinks – not just what they think, but why the thinking feels coherent to them – you’re in a much better position to have a real conversation with them. Or, at minimum, to disagree with them honestly.

The critical toolkit

This is where I need to add a note of caution: none of this works without the right equipment.

Reading challenging material well is a skill. Hell, media literacy is a skill. You need to be able to recognise what you’re engaging with as a piece of text, brought to the front by someone with their own insights and perspective, biases and information. You need to differentiate sound logic from fallacies. That requires something of a critical toolkit, and the capacity to engage with an argument without dismissing it prematurely or being uncritically swept along by it. And not everyone’s toolkit is the same. Not everyone knows which of their tools is blunt.

For instance, it’s very easy to get caught out by logical fallacies. The slippery slope is a popular one, loved by comment sections and politicians and commentators: “If we start doing X, where does it end?” Well, somewhere. A slippery slope is a great way to seem to discredit a whole line of thinking by taking it to an absurd extreme. But once you know how to spot it (and other fallacies), your reading – and thinking – skills improve.

Reading across your disagreements is, among other things, practice for knowing where ideology sways more than reason, and how to check whether the loudest person in the room is also the one with the right things to say.

Which books are worth your time?

Not every book that challenges you is worth your time. Challenge alone isn’t sufficient. Some books are simply not very good – poorly argued, intellectually dishonest, or have their ideological blinkers so well fitted that engaging with them seriously would require more generosity than they’ve earned.

So how do you tell the difference?

One useful rule of thumb: read the introduction, which in a serious work of non-fiction usually lays out the argument, the method, and the intellectual stakes. If the introduction engages with the nuance of the discussion to follow, acknowledges counter-evidence, and treats its reader as a capable adult – that’s a reasonable signal that what follows will be worth your time, even if you end up disagreeing with every word. If it’s pure assertion, then you’re probably fine to put it down.

Reputation matters, but not in the direction you might expect. Some of the most useful books to read are the ones whose authors attract the most reflexive dismissal. See above re Rand. But also hot-topic authors like Jordan Peterson, who’s something of a darling in the manosphere. It’s very easy, especially in certain circles, to decide not to read his work based on his public persona and the most extreme reactions to it. But if it’s important to you to genuinely understand the people who do engage with his thinking – and there are a lot of them – then it pays to read him. You don’t have to agree. You don’t have to like it. But you should probably know what he actually says. 

Also, treat every text as ‘constructed’. Every essay, article, book, and tweet presents a version of its author’s truth. Nothing is neutral. The question isn’t whether a piece of writing has a perspective or a bias – it always does – but whether the perspective is argued honestly and with evidence, or whether it’s being smuggled in under the cover of objectivity. That’s true of things you agree with as much as things you don’t.

Reading books that shape you

I’ll come back to where I started, because I think the Atlas Shrugged example captures something I haven’t fully said yet.

I’ve recommended that book to people – with caveats, with context, with the caveat that it’s too long and I think the philosophy is wrong in some fairly important ways. But I also think that reading it is genuinely insightful: it’s made me better at understanding a part of the world I’d otherwise be guessing at.

The books that have shaped me aren’t always the ones that I find myself agreeing with every page. They’re the ones that have pushed my grey matter a bit further, or I’ve taken notes in the margins, because the ideas were serious enough to deserve a serious response.

That kind of reading is slower. It takes more effort. The brain has to work harder, which, as it turns out, is the point.

So read the books you think you’d hate. Or at least, give them a damn good go – critically and carefully. And with enough openness to ask the one question that makes it worthwhile: What does this person know that I don’t?

Sometimes the answer is: not much. And that’s useful too.

But sometimes – and more often than you’d expect – the book you were most tempted to dismiss turns out to be one of the best things on your shelf.