3 Practices for Better Reading | A Long Shot | Interview with Paul Millerd ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
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3 Practices for Better Reading | A Long Shot | Interview with Paul Millerd ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
July 23rd, 2026
_A newsletter by_ Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Hi friends,
I’m writing this edition after ten days in the US, where I attended an entrepreneur retreat, recorded podcasts, and wrapped up the trip by giving a keynote to more than 3,000 people (for those of you who have followed my public speaking experiments, you’ll know how big a deal that is for me!).
I’m now sitting at my gate waiting for my flight back to London which is delayed by five hours, so I thought I’d catch up on some reading. That’s when I realized how much the way I read has changed since retraining as a neuroscientist.
So in this edition, we’ll explore three ways you can read more like a scientist. Hit reply and let me know which one you find most helpful!
— Anne-Laure
P.S. Long shot, but I just learned that my NYT essay appeared in print and I completely missed it. Does anyone happen to have a copy of the July 12 edition?
When we think about a scientist reading, we might imagine them slouching over an obscure academic paper, poring over words printed so tiny they might need a magnifying glass. Ok, I’m exaggerating a bit, but still – nobody really aspires to that kind of reading.
However, there’s a way to read like a scientist that I think anyone could benefit from, even (and maybe especially) if their work has seemingly nothing to do with science. This way of reading can apply to long essays, nonfiction books, and even novels – any kind of reading that requires enough time and energy that you want to make the most out of it.
First, scientists rarely read a paper without already having an idea of what they’re going to get from it. You go to a paper looking for something specific: a method you could borrow, a number you need, or a result that might impact what you’re working on.
Scientists also read adversarially. Not unkindly, but with the assumption that the author is a person making an argument, and that they could be wrong. So they ask, where’s the control group? How many people were in this study?
And they don’t read alone. They constantly share papers with others, and journal clubs have been a fixture of academic life since the 1800’s.
None of this requires a lab. It’s a way to approach any kind of reading, and it’s based on just three key practices.
Practice 1: Formulate a hypothesis
By explicitly stating what you expect to get out of a book, you will instantly make your reading experience more generative.
Your hypothesis doesn’t need to be clever or well-informed. It just needs to be specific enough that the book can turn out to contradict it. This means you’ll be able to talk about the book in more interesting ways: “I expected this book to be X, but it was actually Y.”
And there’s also a useful quirk of memory here. If you’re confident about something, get it wrong and then find out the right answer, you tend to remember the correction better. The gap between your expectation and the actual experience helps you learn.
Practice 2: Exercise critical thinking
Reading a book like a scientist is like turning a one-way experience into a dialogue. Read in conversation with yourself (current and past) and with other authors you’ve read. Where do they agree, where do they disagree?
Whenever you read something on a subject you’ve read about before, ask what the two authors would say to each other. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and Transcendence by Gaia Vince both tell the story of early human societies, but from a different vantage point. Reading the second one changes how you think about the first one.
Again, that works for novels too! A famous example is comparing 1984 and Brave New World when it comes to their take on what a future dystopia might look like.
Practice 3: Share what you learned
For scientists, knowledge that stays in their head can’t be checked, corrected, or built on by anyone else.
The same applies to your reading. If you can’t say anything about a book a month after finishing it, it probably means you haven’t taken anything away from it.
So, tell a friend about the book, write a note to your future self, share your thoughts on social media – it doesn’t matter which format you choose. What matters is putting the idea into your own words, because that’s when you find out whether you actually understood it (which is the idea behind the Feynman technique).
The good news is, you don’t need a system for any of this. Just pick up whichever book you’re planning to read next and finish this sentence: “I expect this book to…”
Then read it, notice how the experience differs from your expectation, and share what you learned with others. That’s how you read like a scientist.
Ready to put these ideas into practice? Try this week’s tiny experiment:
I will [read like a scientist] for [2 weeks].
This will help engage deeper with the books and long-form essays you read, and maybe even have better conversations about them. Want to dig deeper? Get your copy of Tiny Experiments.
PAUL MILLERD
Each week I ask a curious mind about their habits, routines, and rituals. This week we learn from indie writer and digital creator Paul Millerd, author of The Pathless Path (now available as a premium hardcover) and Good Work.
1. One daily practice you can’t do without? Slow quality time and coffee with my daughter each morning. She helps me make my coffee, we eat together, and then play games, dance, and sing Moana songs. It’s the best.
2. One idea that keeps you up at night? I’ve been fascinated with the stories that keep people on paths which they admittedly hate. I write to give these people permission to dream in a new direction. Once I’ve planted this imagination bomb and kickstarted their inevitable existential crisis, I immediately send them to Anne-Laure so that they can do their first tiny experiment.
3. One mindset shift that transformed your work? I went through a pretty radical shift from seeing work as something that sucked and was worth trying to escape to something that is a simpler, but essential part of life.
• Your reading list, simplified. If books like Tiny Experiments, Flow, and How to Change Your Mind catch your eye, Shortform helps you learn the key ideas faster with expert summaries and practical exercises. The first 500 readers get 20% off.
Many thanks to our sponsors and cross-promo partners for supporting the Ness Labs newsletter! Want to appear here? Please email support@nesslabs.com to learn more.
If you enjoy the newsletter, you’ll love our community of curious minds conducting tiny experiments within a safe space and learning together. Here is an overview of upcoming events (full calendar):
• Explore the art of gentle discipline. In this guided session, Gosia Fricze will walk you through ways to stay committed without becoming rigid, and how to create sustainable structures that support your ambitions.
**• Protect your mental health at work.** In this one-hour workshop, Adina Dinu will teach you the work factors that undermine your well-being, the differences between stress, burnout, and trauma, and healthy ways to respond to stress and adversity at work.
**• Make progress on your projects.** Join Kathryn Ruge for our Monday ‘body doubling’ coworking session to work on personal or work-related projects that you want to make progress on, covering all timezones. Ethan Miller is also hosting a cowriting session on Sunday this week.
**• Improve your knowledge management system.** Join our next PKM meeting where we learn from one another through sharing how our systems work in the real world and give new PKM users a leg up.
**• Host your own workshop.** Do you have an idea for a short presentation and Q&A or a workshop you’d like to trial? Test your first iteration in the Ness Labs community and get feedback. We promote all sessions here in the newsletter.
All of these and future events are included in the price of the membership (only $49 for one year), as well as access to our courses, workshop library, and a dedicated space to track your tiny experiments.
Until next week, take care!
Anne-Laure.
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