Slow > fast information

Hey - It’s Michael.

Spent an incredibly fulfilling weekend with dear friends in Munich. Berlin afterwards - still as wild as I remember it. Enjoy the newsletter!

You open social media. A million sales pitches are shot at you. They are all disguised as knowledge. This you need to do, that you need change.

There’s a new app - learn even faster, better. Summaries on demand.

You ask your LLM about this topic to get a short answer or that mystery to learn something new.

Overwhelm - you go to bed and still don’t change your behavior even though you now “know” lots of new things.

Knowing facts and actually learning - that is: changing behavior - are two very different things.

Knowledge generation for humans has been vastly accelerating over the past 130 years - much faster than our minds will ever be capable of learning all there is to learn about.

This fact entails two strategies: choose well what you want to learn about. And if you do - do it slow. Deep knowledge - the knowledge that changes behavior - takes time.

Principle

Choose slow mediums.

The key idea is: slow mediums give you plenty of time & information to change your mindsets & beliefs. Which is essentially what changes your behaviors. It’s not merely the knowledge that you learn but everything around that knowledge.

Lastly, in an age, in which anyone can generate large amounts of text, it is utterly important to vet the author. It takes too much time to factcheck every small bit of info that social media presents to you - better read a book by a scientist who’s been in the field for 30 years.

A personal example that makes it obvious: I always knew sleeping little is bad. I consumed lots of social media content of this bedtime routine & that hack to sleep better. And I knew all about how my life would become so much greater if I slept more. Of course I kept doing all sorts of things that hurt my sleep.

Reading - now one of my favorite books ever - “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker changed all that.

Only recently I realized, it’s not because I learned many more facts but because all the scientific evidence presented led to changing my beliefs. I realized: sleep is by far the most important recovery activity you can do to live a healthy & fulfilling life. I changed my mindset and thus my priorities. Everyday now it influences my decision making: “Nothing is more important than my sleep” comes up when I plan work, trips or think about going out with friends.

This is the power of slow mediums.

To apply that power, simply choose vetted information sources that give you depth of knowledge:

Books > Podcasts / LLM answers / Long Form Videos > Short Form Content (Social Media Posts/Videos,…)

The shorter the content, the higher the risk that you A) absorb wrong information & B) not actually learn - that is change your behavior - at all.

“If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” - Derek Sivers

What am I actually trying to learn when I click social media content? Is there a better way to learn this?

See you next week - Michael