Once you’ve grasped the rudiments of a field, reading discipline-specific books quickly reaches diminishing returns.

I’ve only read one book on customer experience in the last ten years, for example. Not because I think I know it all, but because I want to bring something new to the discipline, stretch my mind in different directions, and expose myself to leftfield ideas, which generally means avoiding the established canon. What I’m trying to do with my reading is create my own little intellectual Galapagos where new ideas can take shape away from the mainland.

I can’t recall reading a single CX book as reference material when I wrote my own book on the topic. Instead, three of the key reference texts were The Lonely Crowd (anthropology), Baudrillard’s System of Objects (philosophy) and The Complete Stanislavsky ToolKit (method acting). Similarly, the whole idea for The Grid was inspired by a physiotherapy textbook called Anatomy Trains.

If you want to innovate or make a meaningful contribution to a field, rather than binging on category bestsellers I’d encourage you to read more broadly, immersing yourself in whatever piques your curiosity — knitting, comedy, Victorian plumbing, astrophysics, whatever — then allow everything to marinade in your mind.

Soon enough new ideas will bubble to the surface, and then you’ve got something fresh and exciting to contribute. Best of all, one good idea is often all you need to change the trajectory of your career for the better, stand out from the crowd, and push your discipline forward.

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