In my opinion, books are the highest leverage format to learn timeless knowledge. In contrast, social media leads to junk learning by default.
Here are four reasons why:
#1: Books contain people's best thoughts of the year, while social media contains people’s best thoughts of the day
Authors typically spend years creating a single book. They filter through all of their ideas to pick one. Then they spend months working through many drafts with the support of an editor.
On the other hand, social media posts are people’s best thoughts of the day and are unedited.
#2: Books provide context and nuance, while social media delivers one unrelated hot take after another
Sites like Twitter are quote and meme generators. They filter for pithy ideas that sound smart, but they don't optimize for providing the context necessary to deeply understand complex and nuanced aspects of reality.
#3: Books don't have distractions
Imagine reading a book with an ad that looks like content every 200 words. Imagine constantly getting notifications as you read. That's what reading on a website is like. Even the most disciplined, focused people succumb to distractions in this environment.
#4: Books feel great
Somehow, when we feel, smell, and see a book, it goes deeper into our minds. Research backs this up.
Not only that, collections of books inspire wonder. Just as gazing at billions of stars in the night sky gives us a sense of humility and wonder, so too does being surrounded by books in our libraries.
Bottom line…
Books Are Amazing, But They Have Two Serious Drawbacks
The challenge of books is two-fold:
A lot of information in most books isn’t relevant, interesting, or important to you.
It takes a lot of willpower and focus to digest the contents of a book.
To help overcome the challenges of reading books while getting the benefits, three approaches have worked best for me:
Fractal Reading
Title Skimming
Augmented Reading
Augmented Reading is the highest leverage approach and uses the power of AI.
#1: Fractal Reading
See also: fractal reading bot
#2: Title Skimming
Source: Interview I did with Emerson Spartz
#3: Augmented Reading
I introduce the basics of Augmented Reading in Augmented Reading: Learn 10x Faster And Better With AI. More specifically, I share how to upload books, studies, and video / podcasts transcripts into AI so you can get summaries and syntheses.
In this class, we go deeper into the black boxes involved in turning other people’s knowledge into knowledge in your head and then into your own thought leader ideas…
Then, we begin a discussion of how to use AI to facilitate the steps within each black box. In this session, I dived into my idea matrix mental model for turning other people’s knowledge into your own thought leadership ideas.
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