Self-awareness

Drowning in Information, Starving for Insight

Volume isn't the problem. Filtering is. The thing you're missing is a deletion habit.

You can't read your way to clarity. The brain that consumes 200 articles a week and the brain that consumes 5 carefully-chosen ones aren't both well-informed — one is paralyzed and the other is loaded.

Insight is what survives compression. If you can't say it in a sentence, you don't have it yet.

Symptoms

How information overload shows up

  1. You can't recall last week's reading

    If three days ago is fog, the input wasn't load-bearing.

  2. Decision paralysis on small calls

  3. More opinions than action

  4. A vague sense that you should read more

The opposite of overload isn't less reading. It's better deleting.

Try this for a week: every time you save an article, write the one sentence you'd quote from it 30 days from now. If you can't, don't save it. The act of writing the sentence is the read.

Insight is what survives compression.

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