What Can Stop The Brain Rot?

Let’s not bury the lede… it’s reading books.

We don’t talk enough about what books do to the brain.
Not what they contain… not the story… not the author.
The act of reading itself.
Because reading is not natural.
Speaking is… breathing is.

Reading? That’s an acquired skill.

One that rewires the brain.
According to the experts, it coordinates visual processing, language comprehension, memory and imagination… all firing in milliseconds.
And those circuits are fragile.
They only grow stronger through practice.
Through focus… Through repetition.
Through sitting still long enough to let the words do their work.

That’s why leaders like you should be obsessed with books.

Not business books… not the latest bestseller…
Any book.
Because when you read a book, you’re training the one skill that distraction culture is trying hardest to kill.

Attention.

And attention is leadership.
Think about it… in meetings, what people crave isn’t more slides.
It’s your presence… your focus.
Your ability to sit with a problem longer than the others.
You ability to stay focused in that moment (especially when most of those moments are still happening online in tiny squares).

But here’s the hard truth…

Technology isn’t just stealing time.
It’s competing with the very circuits that reading builds.
This isn’t the television of our childhoods.
It isn’t even the video games some of us grew up with.
Those demanded sustained attention.
Hours of immersion.
But there was no tracking… no ads slipped between levels.
No other apps or social media gaming our brains.

Today’s games and apps are different.

Engineered by design.
Built around persuasive loops.
Every ping another crack in the scaffolding of your focus.
So when you scroll, you’re not just passing time.
You’re retraining your brain.
You’re practicing distraction.
You’re rehearsing fragmentation.

And our kids are watching.

They don’t see what’s on your screen.
They just see you buried in one.
They just do what kids do: model themselves after the adults.
If all they see is scrolling, that’s the habit they’ll learn.
If they see a book, a pause, a moment of stillness… they’ll learn something else (whether they know it or not).

That’s the secondary story here.

When you pick up a book, you’re not only raising yourself as a reader… you’re raising them too.
Warsaw gets it.
They built a library inside a metro station.
Fresh herbs growing in the walls… coffee.
Sixteen thousand books to borrow as you wait for a train.
Another signal that books belong in daily life.

Signals matter.

Because the question isn’t whether books will survive… they will.
The question is whether we will survive without them.

What happens when leaders stop building those circuits?

When they can’t hold a thought long enough to see it through?
When strategy becomes another dopamine loop… reacting instead of reflecting?

AI could make this worse.

Not just because it can write books too.
But because it will feed us ideas pre-chewed… an illusion of knowledge without the discipline of attention.
Leaders who stop reading will think they’re still learning.
But they’ll just be skimming.
Floating on the surface.
Never building the deep circuits that thinking requires.

And that’s the biggest provocation here.

Books aren’t just for entertainment.
They’re not even just for knowledge.
They’re training for focus.
For leadership… for being present in a world designed to scatter us.
A world that is being designed to give us everything we need in that tiny, glowing rectangle that we carry with us everywhere.

So yes… read for your kids.

Model it.
Let them see you with a book instead of a phone (and, sure an e-reader does the trick as well).
But more importantly… read for yourself.
Because the future will not belong to those who know the most.
It will belong to those who can sit still long enough to think.

Or think about it this way… if you can’t hold your attention on a book… why should anyone bother holding their attention on you?

This is what Elias Makos and I discussed on CJAD 800 AM.

Mitch Joel · What Can Stop The Brain Rot? – The Elias Makos Show – CJAD 800

Before you go… ThinkersOne is a new way for organizations to buy bite-sized and personalized thought leadership video content (live and recorded) from the best Thinkers in the world. If you’re looking to add excitement and big smarts to your meetings, corporate events, company off-sites, “lunch & learns” and beyond, check it out.