𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗵𝗶𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱. 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗻’𝘁 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹. A Pepperdine professor describes students who cannot read a single sentence. Not analyze it. Just read it. Her fix is to read aloud in class. Line by line. She calls it new pedagogy. It is remedial work being rebranded. Those students now work for you. They struggle with a 10-page memo unless there is a summary. They paste documents into ChatGPT instead of reading them. They cannot write a clear email because they never learned to think on paper. They were trained that friction is optional. That someone else will reduce complexity for them. So when work gets dense, they reach for shortcuts. The summary. The template. The AI rewrite. The output sounds competent and says very little. It wastes time and hides errors. Reading is how people learn to sit with complexity. How they follow an argument across pages. How they notice what does not fit. That training was stripped out. Forty percent of Americans read zero books last year! (Shocking) Gen Z averages fewer than six. A JPMorgan survey of 111 billionaires found reading at the top of their habits. Not because books are magical. Because reading trains sustained attention on hard things. That is the missing skill. You are competing with firms where someone reads a 50-page contract, finds the issue on page 37, and explains why it matters. Your new hire is three paragraphs in and looking for the takeaway. If someone cannot read complex material, they cannot write it. Writing is organized thought. Weak reading produces empty prose. AI accelerates the problem. It fills the page with words and drains it of meaning. Here is a quick way to filter for these skills. Give candidates a dense document. Ask what matters and why. No summaries. No AI. Many will fail. Hire the ones who do not. The gap between people who can process complexity and those who cannot widens every year. Your competition is on the other side of that gap. https://lnkd.in/e9c2qyJE