For years, most of what I read was non-fiction.
Leadership. Strategy. Change. Mindset. Innovation. Many of the authors even sat across from me as guests on my podcast. Their ideas helped me name patterns, build frameworks, and better understand how organizations and systems work. I still believe deeply in the value of non-fiction, and I will continue to recommend it.
If I am being honest, fiction felt different.
It felt like an escape.
Non-fiction felt productive.
It felt legitimate.
Fiction did not feel like serious thinking.
Then someone challenged me with a question I did not expect.
What if some of the most honest thinking about the future is not happening in business books at all, but in fiction?
At first, I resisted the idea. But this year, something shifted. Fiction did not replace my thinking. It expanded it.
Fiction Did Not Give Me Answers. It Gave Me Better Questions.
Non-fiction is excellent at explaining the world as it is. Fiction prepares you for the world when it breaks, bends, or transforms.
This year reminded me that we are not short on information. We are short on imagination, moral rehearsal, and the ability to sit inside uncertainty without rushing to resolution. Fiction does something rare. It allows you to live inside the consequences of decisions rather than analyze them from a safe distance.
Moral rehearsal is the ability to practice judgment before the stakes are real. It is the chance to sit with ethical tension, tradeoffs, and unintended consequences in a low-risk environment. Fiction gives us that space. It asks not what is efficient or optimal, but what is human, what is fair, and what we are willing to live with once the decision is made.
That kind of rehearsal is increasingly difficult to find in a world optimized for speed.
It does not optimize.
It does not summarize.
It does not rush to a closure.
It stretches the same muscles leaders, parents, builders, and citizens need when certainty runs out.
Stories That Stayed With Me
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler did not feel like a prediction. It felt like a warning and an invitation at the same time. It forced me to confront how quickly systems collapse when empathy erodes, and how leadership often emerges not from authority, but from adaptability and belief. Change, in Butler’s world, is constant. The question is whether we evolve with it or resist until we are overtaken by it.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir reminded me that intelligence alone never saves us. Even in the most technical and high-stakes environments, progress depends on curiosity, humility, and the willingness to collaborate across differences. The most advanced problem-solving still rests on profoundly human foundations.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig explored a quieter but equally powerful tension. It challenged the idea that there is one correct path, one optimized life, or one perfect decision. In a culture obsessed with optionality and optimization, it revealed the emotional cost of believing that certainty is just one better choice away.
Pilgrims by MR Leonard stretched my thinking in unexpected ways. It asked what happens when humanity encounters the unknown and must translate meaning together. Faith, language, tradition, and technology collide, and no framework arrives to resolve the tension. It reframed leadership for me as translation rather than control, and meaning as something discovered collectively rather than measured.
Two short stories stayed with me long after I finished them.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and N. K. Jemisin’s The Ones Who Stay and Fight do not offer solutions. They offer a mirror. Both describe societies that appear just, prosperous, and harmonious until you understand what that harmony depends on.
What struck me was not the world-building, but the question they quietly place on the reader.
What kind of person are you when comfort depends on a hidden cost?
Le Guin explores the moral clarity of walking away. Jemisin explores the conviction to stay and confront the system from within. Neither path is clean. Neither is easy. Together, they expose something we rarely name in organizations and systems. Outcomes are often celebrated without interrogating what they require.
Fiction refuses to let the reader outsource that decision. There is no data to hide behind. No framework to dissolve the tension. You are left with judgment, values, and responsibility.
And that may be the most important leadership rehearsal of all.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin grounded everything back in human consequence. It is a story about creation, ambition, and the cost of building something over time. It reminded me that innovation is never just about ideas or outcomes. It is about relationships, wounds, joy, and the people who carry the work long after the applause fades.
As I close out the year, I am reading The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. It is quietly radical. In a world obsessed with efficiency, compliance, and control, it argues for gentleness, kindness, and moral courage. It has made me reflect on how often humanity is protected not by disruption, but by people willing to care when the system does not.
What Fiction Gave Me That Non-Fiction Could Not
This year, fiction helped me rehearse the future emotionally, not just intellectually.
It reminded me that progress always comes with trade-offs. That technology amplifies values before it solves problems. That leadership often emerges without a title. That certainty is seductive, but rarely honest. That meaning is shaped through story long before it is captured in strategy.
Non-fiction helped me understand these ideas. Fiction helped me feel them.
And feeling matters. Because the most complex decisions are not made in spreadsheets, they are made in moments where information is incomplete, stakes are high, and consequences ripple outward in ways no model can fully capture.
Looking Ahead
Going into the new year, I will continue reading non-fiction. I will keep learning from thinkers who help us name patterns and frameworks.
But I will no longer treat fiction as secondary.
Because the future will not arrive as a white paper.
It will arrive as a story we are already inside.
So as this year comes to a close, I will leave you with a final question.
What fiction will you read in the new year, and what question do you want it to help you rehearse before the stakes are real?
If this kind of thinking resonates, you can subscribe to my newsletter for future reflections on humanity, technology, and leadership.