Looking for something to read this weekend? We’ve scoured the web for thought-provoking articles and essays. Enjoy!

In a recent piece for the Harvard Business Review, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Mara Swan argue that “it’s the company’s job to help employees learn.” As they point out, most jobs now

“require the capacity to keep learning and developing new skills and expertise, even if they are not obviously linked to one’s current job [. . .] People’s employability – their ability to gain and maintain a desired job – no longer depends on what they already know, but on what they are likely to learn.”  

Chamorro-Premuzic and Swan make a compelling case for lifelong learning, while recognizing that “employees must juggle the tension between short-term efficiencies of productivity with the long-term quest for intellectual growth.”  They argue that most companies don’t do a good job of cultivating lifelong learning in their employees, and offer three ways to begin “[fostering] learnability in the workplace.” Read this piece with our own on curiosity and lifelong learning.

Elsewhere on the Internet:

Want meaningful work? Here are 7 ways to find it.

“Book deserts” exist in the United States – and are serious problem for the children who grow up in them.

“In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood.” Joseph Luzzi’s memoir reflects on his experience of grief and the way literature helped him through it. Read an excerpt at The Literary Hub.

The Wall Street Journal has some fascinating research on the power of good storytelling.

We use personality quizzes to find out about ourselves and others. Here, the history of one famous literary quiz: The Proust Questionnare.

Another quiz – the one you take if you want to work at the iconic New York City bookstore, The Strand. This essay has some interesting insights into their hiring process, too. 

Finally, if you missed it, we released our newest project this week – the story of Books@Work, as told through film.

Image: Vincent van Gogh, Still Life with French Novels, 1887, The Robert Holmes à Court Collection, Perth [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

Stories that Resonate: Sharing Literature with Veterans
Just Listen: A Simple Tool for Minimizing Bias and Transforming Relationships
Storytelling as “Game-Changing Technology”

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