What Happens When You Try Something New

The Reader’s Edge | Charlie Samways | April 12, 2026

As soon as you find routines that make your life comfortable, it’s easy to hold onto them. 

Comfort is efficient. It saves energy, reduces friction, and lets you move through your days without unnecessary resistance.

The problem is that comfort and growth use different mechanisms. One requires repetition. The other requires disruption.

Last week I did something small that reminded me of this. As a committed Kindle user, I spent a week testing the Kobo Libra Colour, a device I had no practical reason to try. What I didn't expect was what the contrast would teach me.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman found that dopamine is released not as a reward, but as a signal. This is the brain's way of saying pay attention, something unfamiliar is happening. This is why you remember your first week in a new job more vividly than the entire year that follows. Familiarity is the brain putting things on autopilot. Novelty switches the autopilot off.

The term for what familiarity does to perception is habituation, a repeated stimulus that gets filed as background noise. Trying something genuinely different, whether that's a new device, a new genre, or a book by someone whose worldview challenges yours, is a way of reversing it. A perceptual reset.

The French novelist and Nobel laureate, André Gide, summarised this well when he said:

"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."

Inversion

The principle of inversion comes from Charlie Munger, one of the most well-read people of the last century: you understand something most clearly by studying its opposite.

Testing the Kobo didn't tell me the Kobo was better. It told me precisely what I value about the Kindle, and a few things I'd stopped noticing were missing. The contrast revealed the preference.

The same principle works in reading. Pick up a book you expect to disagree with. Not to be converted, but to understand your own position more precisely. You may find it shifts. You may find it hardens. Either way, you'll know more clearly what you actually think.

Disagreement handled in the right way is clarifying.

This Week’s Question

Have you challenged yourself to read a book you expected to disagree with? What were the outcomes when you did this?

Reply to me at hello@charliesamways.com. I read every one.

From The Channel This Week

This week, I released a video sharing my experience with the Kobo Libra Colour, and addressing the one problem sitting within the Kobo vs Kindle debate. If this newsletter resonated, this will be worth your time.

Kobo vs Kindle - The Problem Nobody Talks About

Wishing you a week of success and finding a book that may challenge your existing views.

Catch up next week,

Charlie Samways