A friend sent me a quote that had reminded them of me and my reading habit:

If you do something like read a lot of books and talk to a lot of people, you can learn almost anything.

~ Elon Musk

I totally agree. Many people think that structured learning (i.e., school) is the only way to learn. The reality is that nothing stops people from learning (almost) anything they want to learn. They just need to grab some books and talk to knowledgeable, credible people. And then put in a lot of effort.

I’m a big fan of continual learning. It’s mentally stimulating and fun. Reading is my favorite method, but I also listen to lots of podcasts on YouTube while I’m doing other things. Over the last year, I’ve become more intentional about what I listen to. Here are a few rules I try to stick to:

• Experience sharing – I aim to listen to interviews with people who’ve done the thing I’m interested in learning. I want to hear about what they did, why they did it, what the outcome was, and what they learned.
• Frameworks – If I’m trying to learn something and there’s a method or approach that’s led to outsize success, I’ll listen to people discuss that framework.
• History  – I enjoy hearing recounts of what happened in the past, but I don’t want opinions. I want the facts and the timeline.
• How to think – I don’t enjoy podcasts where people are trying to convince listeners that the way they see things is the right way. I want to hear only the facts. I can then decide how to think about them (rightly or wrongly).
• Talking heads – I tend to avoid people who want the limelight or want to be famous. They talk even when they’re not saying anything substantive.
• Niches – I tend to enjoy podcasts that go deep into niches I’m interested in. Broad or generic podcasts don’t appeal to me. I’d rather listen to people who know a lot about a little than people who know a little about a lot.
• Predictions – Predicting the future is impossible, although many people try. I avoid listening to podcasts where people make predictions.
• Giving back – I really enjoy podcasts where people who’ve had outsize success share their story and what they’ve learned simply because they want to pay it forward.
• Authors – If I’m interested in a book, I’ll try to find interviews with the author. If I like the interviews and the author is a clear thinker, I’m more inclined to purchase the book.

This list isn’t static. It will change as my listening habits evolve. But with so much content out there, I’ve found it helpful to apply criteria to ensure that the things I’m listening to align with my goal of continual learning and I don’t consume mindless content.

A year or so ago, I learned about someone who ran a single-person business focused on farmers. I read up on the entrepreneur and listened to a few podcast interviews he gave. He was interesting to me because his business was massive, ~$20 million, from ~30,000 paid newsletter subscribers, and he’s a one-man band. I was impressed but figured I’d never be able to make use of what I’d just learned because I don’t know anyone in farming or agriculture.

This week I had a conversation with a team building an accounting platform for farmers. As we talked about marketing, I mentioned the newsletter entrepreneur. They weren’t familiar with him, so I gave them background info and my thoughts about how he could be an asset to their business and how attending any event he attended could pay dividends for them because his subscribers are exactly who their company is trying to reach. That information was helpful to the team and sparked new marketing ideas.

My takeaway is that I never know when something I’ve consumed will be of value to me or someone else down the road, so I should continue to follow my interests and consume content and read books about topics I’m interested in regardless of whether the value is clear at the time.

This week I had a great conversation with someone who came across my blog and reached out. An avid reader and entrepreneur, he asked for feedback, which I gladly gave. I also shared my experience building a product similar to his and some other things I’ve learned. The conversation went longer than we’d planned. He offered to make introductions to other entrepreneurs who are avid readers, which I appreciate.

My takeaway is that sharing what I’ve learned, online for free, encourages serendipity. I have no idea how many people out there are interested in the same things I am. Some of them may come across what I’ve shared, and it may be helpful. And a smaller subset of those who get value from what I share may reach out to discuss ideas.

I enjoy my habits of daily blogging and reading; I’ve grown a ton because of them. And recently I’ve realized that they’re leading to my connecting with like-minded people, which I didn’t expect but do enjoy.  

My takeaway is that sharing what I’ve learned online has little downside and, over the years, a growing upside.

I’ve read several books about decision-making this year. One of the best was What Intelligence Tests Miss. One day, I’ll write up in detail what I learned from the book, but for now I want to share some of what I found interesting. It distinguishes between IQ and rationality and explains that high IQ doesn’t equate to good decision-making.

One thing that stuck with me was what the author called “dysrationalia,” which is the inability to behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence.  

And what does rationality mean? Setting appropriate goals, taking the appropriate action given your goals and beliefs, and having beliefs that make sense given the available evidence.

You can be highly intelligent and still be irrational. This is because smart people can hold beliefs that aren’t grounded in reality and/or make decisions that don’t align with their goals. Said differently, you can be smart and still exercise poor judgment.

This book goes into a lot more detail about traps that lead to poor judgment. If you’re interested in understanding how smart people make bad decisions, you should consider giving this book a read.

I had a great conversation with my mom this week, and we talked about my childhood. Mom was an educator her entire career and has been an avid reader her whole life. She knows the value of reading in learning and child development and made sure that reading was part of my childhood routine. I'm thankful she prioritized this for me.

During our chat, she mentioned that despite her efforts, I hated reading as a child and adolescent. I did the assigned reading, but I made my dislike of it known. I told her it wasn’t the act of reading I didn’t like. The problem was that I was forced to read things that weren’t tailored to me or my interests, which felt like torture for two reasons.

First, I didn’t have control. Even as a child, I didn’t want people telling me what to do, especially things I hated doing. This is still true today. I want to drive the direction and outcomes of my life rather than let life happen to me.

Second, it’s difficult for me to do things that I have no interest in doing. I wasn’t interested in learning about Huckleberry Finn or whatever book my school wanted me to read, so it was hard for me to do it.

Combine those two issues and you have a child who hates reading and is vocal about it. Given that I love to read now, I’ll bet that if my teachers had taken time to understand my interests and let me pick books about those topics, I would have loved reading and read more than was assigned to me.

I’m rereading Think Twice by Michael Mauboussin. One concept he mentions that I’ve been thinking about this week is attributional charity, which means that interpreting others’ behavior empathetically instead of jumping to negative conclusions or morally judging them.

Mauboussin discussed this because he believes that situations play a big role in people’s decision-making processes. Many of us don’t consider or give proper weight to the situation when critiquing other people’s decisions. But when we explain our own decisions, we lead with how the situation justifies them.

Mauboussin shares a few ideas on how to think about the influence of situations on decision-making. One of them is to consider the situation first and the individual second. That is, when evaluating others’ decisions, begin by understanding the situation they’re in and then assess them and their decisions. Not the other way around.

Very interesting concept that I want to incorporate more going forward.

This past weekend, I shared a YouTube interview that I learned a lot from (see here). It was of Joe Liemandt, principal of Alpha School, an AI-driven teaching program and K-12 school. He’s also the founder of Trilogy Software and ESW Capital. Joe said that students in Alpha School do schoolwork for two hours and learn many times faster than students at traditional schools. The key is for students to read for one hour and then summarize what they read for another hour. Joe says this works so well because it leverages the learning-science “depth of knowledge” concept, a hierarchy that I set out in my previous post.

I read every day and get a ton from it. It’s been transformative, but I’ve noticed that I get the most from a book when I create a digest of it. My digest is basically a summary of the ideas and concepts I found helpful in the book. When I’ve created digests, that process has helped me retain what I’ve learned, and I use them as references that I revisit regularly. Unfortunately, I haven’t had success in developing a habit of creating these digests, so I have only a handful of them. The main hurdle is the time involved to create each one.

After listening to Joe’s interview and reading more on “depth of knowledge,” I know I need to add a daily summarization habit to my reading habit. I’m just not sure how to do both things every day without their consuming too much time. This week, I’m going to experiment with summarizing. Hopefully, I’ll learn by doing and discover something that makes it easier to develop this into a consistent habit.

A few weeks ago, I started posting, usually on Sundays, about the content I’d consumed during the last week and what I’d learned from it. I use YouTube as a podcast player, so most of what I share is links to things I’ve listened to on YouTube, although I plan to start adding content from other media once I get the habit down.

What I like most about this habit is that it forces me to do something I wasn’t doing consistently. I always save or bookmark what I consumed and want to revisit later because it contained a valuable nugget of information or insight. But I don’t revisit that saved content, at least not consistently, so a lot of those insights and nuggets go lost.

Writing this weekly post forces me to review that content and synthesize it, which cements what I learned. So, not only am I sharing info, I’m being forced to develop a habit, in public, around something I’ve never been consistent at. That wasn’t why I started writing these weekly emails, but it’s been a nice, unexpected benefit that I’m enjoying.

Continuing with my new protocol, here I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from. This week, I spent time doing general learning about a variety of topics.

What I consumed this week and what I learned from it:

• AI brings execution to the smartest people – YouTube interview with Taylor Holiday, founder and CEO of ad agency Common Thread Collective. He said that AI brings execution to the smartest people, and this really hit me. Holiday’s point is that AI now gives people the ability to execute faster than ever, so it doesn’t make sense to try to bring strategy or strategic thinking down to the people who execute. Changing their ability to think strategically may not be effective. It makes more sense to bring the ability to execute rapidly up to the people who already understand strategy. Before, it didn’t make sense for a high-level person to spend an hour executing a task. But now, they can execute it in a minute using AI, and that does make sense. Having all data in one central place allows you to use AI agents to quickly build HTML pages instead of spending a week creating a deck (see here) to answer data-related questions. Those HTML pages are essentially live dashboards that answer those data-related questions.
• Intensity transforms, consistency maintains – YouTube interview with Canadian entrepreneur Jonathan Goodman. He believes that you need to be intense about something to change or push it forward. Once a change has happened, consistency is needed to maintain it. Consistency alone won’t lead to big changes. You need intense periods of focus to change things, and then you need to figure out what you need to do consistently (but less intensely) to maintain the change. Also interesting were his insights on the differences between your job and your work (see here). A job is what you do for money. Work is what you do for yourself. Once you’ve made enough money from your job, he thinks you should stop the goal line from moving. Conversely, the goal line for work is always moving, and you should pursue your work for the rest of your life.
• How the keto diet controls bipolar and mental disorders – YouTube interview with Roblox CEO David Baszucki and his son Matt, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Fascinating interview about how Matt struggled for years and cycled through various drugs that didn’t have a material impact. Moving to a keto diet completely changed how his brain works, helped him control his disorder, and eliminated his manic episodes. I found it fascinating to learn about the history of human diets and how diet impacts brain chemistry because changing my diet had a big impact on me (though not to Matt’s level).

That’s what I learned from what I consumed last week.