In the late 1940s Claude Shannon lived in a small apartment in Greenwich Village a short walk from his Bell Labs office, frequented jazz clubs, and stayed out late. After he took an axe to his piano to stoke his fire one cold winter, his most cherished remaining possessions were his record player and his clarinet. His loud music annoyed his fellow tenants but led to a passionate romance when his intelligent and vivacious downstairs neighbor knocked on his door to ask him to turn it down. In between his worldly diversions, in Shannon’s intense hours working in his office and scribbling ideas on napkins, he created a new field of science, information theory.²

Bell System was then the monopoly provider of telephone and telegraph service across the United States. At the time, the quality of phone conversations was highly variable, with background noise sometimes making it hard to hear what people were saying. Shannon’s theory was centered on maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio, the proportion of useful information to meaningless noise transmitted over a channel. His broader thesis transformed how we think about information, for the first time positing it as something measurable, and in the process inventing the concept of the “bit” as the elemental unit of information, a concept that underlies the entire digital age.

We now all intuitively understand the personal relevance of a signal-to-noise ratio. In the internet and social media age the amount of “noise,” which essentially means information with zero value, has soared exponentially, far beyond the amount of “signal,” referring to information of value. It is becoming harder to identify what matters to us amid the unlimited effluvia of today’s web.

Simply taking in more information will not yield more signal. “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on,” observes author and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb.³

We urgently need to refine our ability to filter information, which is as much about effortlessly ignoring what is not relevant to us as it is about picking out the pearls from the dross. Venture capital doyen Brad Feld notes that, “I can’t consume signal 100 percent of the time (or my head would explode), so I let plenty of noise creep in, but I’ve got very effectively tunable noise filters. Anyone involved in the entrepreneurial ecosystem should ponder this—I encourage you to focus on amplifying signal, not noise.”⁴

Beyond Overwhelm

Our senses send around 11 million bits of information per second to our brain, yet our conscious minds can only process what has been variously estimated at 40 to 200 bits per second.⁵ We could not function without our brain’s highly refined ability to filter only the most relevant signals from a universe of sensory input.

The result of “the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system” is “a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive,” observes the great writer Aldous Huxley.⁶ Our brain’s filtering mechanisms are designed to protect us. Conditions such as ADHD, schizophrenia, and autism are often associated with atypical filtering that can result in painful sensory overwhelm.

Yet attenuated sensory filtering has also been linked to creativity and the ability to experience at times intense perceptions of beauty. We need to limit the onslaught on our senses, yet there is deep danger from over filtering. Today many people seem to notice little around them, living lives of deep routine, immured from the world save for what comes to them through their digital devices. Their constrained perception restricts not just what they see, but every aspect of their thinking, experience, and lives.

Effectively filtering out the irrelevant while noticing what matters is a skill fundamental to survival and success. While our individual neurophysiology can help or hinder this, we can tap our brains’ neuroplasticity to improve our sensory-filtering capabilities.⁷ We do not need to accept how our inbuilt filtering mechanisms work by default. “The art of seeing has to be learned,” novelist Marguerite Duras reminds us.⁸

What Information Serves You?

Immersed in information, we need to judiciously apply both technological and cognitive filters. To do that we require criteria for assessing what should pass through our filters and what should be ignored. In Chapter 1 you considered your purposes for engaging with information. Knowing these provides valuable guidance, yet by themselves they may not yield clarity on what specifically merits your precious attention.

My old friend Karl-Erik Sveiby incisively observed over 20 years ago that while some information has value, a great deal of information in fact has negative value, when the cost of the time and effort of consuming a piece of information is greater than what it brings you.⁹ Even more so if it is misleading, inaccurate, or outright false, as is now depressingly common. We need to be able to assess whether any given information has positive or negative value for us, based on our unique circumstances and intentions.

The ability to discern the information that best serves you shapes the quality of your life.

Information serves us if it helps us to understand the world better, make better decisions, and live more fulfilled lives, even in the smallest way. Information does not serve us well if it misleads us, reinforces our biases, makes us unhappy, or simply wastes our time and attention by being irrelevant to our intentions.

Your knowledge frameworks are the foundation of your mental models, thinking, and decisions. As you saw in Chapter 2, any new information should be assessed relative to your frameworks, in whether they fit well, refine your thinking, or provide new evidence to consider.

We also need to heed the impact of information on our mood and emotions. Many studies have demonstrated a correlation between depression and overuse of social media.¹⁰ The word “doomscrolling,” describing compulsively following upsetting news, was first used in 2018. Two years later the rise of Covid-19 made it an accurate description of how we all behaved, earning it an accolade of “word of the year.”¹¹

The reality is almost all reported news is negative, and most “good news” initiatives have failed abysmally. Yet we can tend to avoid what distresses us and turn to what we find encouraging or inspiring. Make a point of noticing the influence on your mood as you consume different kinds of news. As you can, tend toward what uplifts you and away from what adversely impacts you. Simple behavior changes can make a big difference.

When you seek to identify whether information serves you well, the most important consideration is if it enhances your mental models. You must be highly aware of whether information fits with your current thinking. Identifying data that supports your thinking is natural and can be useful. However, you also need to seek the most interesting evidence that could show that what you believe might, in fact, not be precisely true. We need to overcome our inbuilt inclination to seek validation.

Transcending Bias

In the late 1960s the gifted and ebullient Amos Tversky gave a presentation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he taught on how people take in new information, proposing they were usually rational. In the audience was the self-professed pessimist Daniel Kahneman, who told Tversky, “Brilliant talk, but I don’t believe a word of it,” submitting that our judgments are likely as prone to error as our highly fallible senses.¹²

This sparked one of the seminal scientific collaborations of the last century, with the pair introducing the concept of “cognitive bias” to the world, cataloguing in detail the manifold failings of our minds to accurately perceive the world around us. After Tversky’s death, Kahneman received the Nobel Prize for the groundbreaking advances the duo had made in uncovering the nature of our brains.

In short, they brought to light that humans do not see the world as it is, with many inbuilt biases leading us to an incorrect understanding of what is around us. Some biases are quite simple, such as primacy and recency bias, which result in us being more likely to remember the first and last things that we see or hear in a sequence. More central to the distortions in which we process information are those that support our preconceptions.

Likely the most fundamental and most insidious bias is confirmation bias, which leads us to perceive and give importance to information that supports our prior views, and to ignore, downplay, or simply not see evidence that contradicts our opinions. Dozens of studies have verified the phenomenon, but you don’t need to read them; I’m sure you see this phenomenon amply demonstrated by those around you. Yet it is one thing to notice it in others, another to see it in yourself. At the center of Kahneman’s work is the observation, “it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.”¹³

In the parlance of cognitive psychology shared in Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, we need System 2—our deliberative mind—to regularly override System 1—our responsive mind. This cannot and does not need to be through every moment of the day. The reality is that much of our cognition and behavior is driven by habit and intuition. Yet when actively filtering information, we should strive to be conscious, aware we inevitably have cognitive biases that constrain our ability to integrate pertinent information. We need to deliberately seek out evidence that will improve our mental models and decisions.

Probabilistic Thinking

Thomas Bayes spent his working life as a church minister in eighteenth-century southern England. During his life he also managed to write two papers, one on theology and the other on mathematics. It was only after his death that his unpublished work on probability was passed on to a friend, who marshaled it through the process of presenting it to the Royal Society. Two hundred and fifty years later Bayes’s work is considered more relevant than ever and has become deeply embedded in Silicon Valley culture.¹⁴

Bayes’s theorem describes the probability that a given event will occur. The heart of the approach is to start with an estimated probability, using whatever means available, and then updating the probability based on all new information. The model has extensive applications beyond statistical analysis, notably in finance, medicine, and genetics, and is now used extensively in building machine learning models, which are designed to keep improving based on additional information.

The impact of Bayes’s work goes far beyond the mathematicians that apply it. It represents a frame of mind of actively seeking new information. It is founded on the assumption that current thinking can be improved. In the book Superforecasting, which studies the small minority who excel at forecasting complex events, the authors note that “what matters far more to the super-forecasters than Bayes’ theorem is Bayes’ core insight of gradually getting closer to the truth by constantly updating in proportion to the weight of the evidence.”¹⁵

One of the most powerful shifts you can make is from convictions to probabilistic thinking.

Bayesian thinking is in essence continuously seeking new information so you can enhance your assessment of a situation. This is called a “Bayesian update,” or more bluntly for humans, a “belief revision.” As you saw in Chapter 2, a prediction or attribution of a probability provides a valuable filter for any new information, highlighting what is pertinent and allowing refinement of the underlying thinking. Thinking in terms of likelihoods means that when you encounter new information, you can move beyond considering whether it supports or contradicts your views, to assessing its impact on the probabilities you attribute to your theses.

Look for Surprises

In a similar way to predictive text on your smartphone, your brain is continually building expectations for what comes next. If what happens is close enough to what it anticipates, its response is minimal. If, however, a word, sound, image, or idea is unexpected, the brain generates an N400 electrical pulse, so called because it has a negative potential and peaks 400 milliseconds after the event.

N400 is essentially a signal of surprise. Neuroscientists John Kounios and Mark Beeman, whom you will meet again later in this book, explain that “we continuously build mental models of the world around us—our boxes—to help predict what will happen next. Any deviation from these expectations causes a group of neurons to shout in synchrony to signal that something is different, unexpected, or just wrong. And those brainwaves aren’t pointless alarms. They are critical to the brain’s efforts to keep itself current and accurate.”¹⁶

While we are afflicted with cognitive biases, our brain also tries to alert us when our mental models may be wrong. We must pay attention. “A capacity for surprise is an essential aspect of our mental life, and surprise itself is the most sensitive indication of how we understand our world and what we expect from it,” says Kahneman.

Surprises are immensely more valuable than finding what you expect.

As we scan our information sources, we need to be most keenly attuned to what does not fit with our frameworks and mental models. In Chapter 2 you learned how to use your frameworks to identify signals of what does and doesn’t fit with your models. As you daily soak in information, your first priority is finding what is both surprising and credible.

The Time Value of Information

It seems the vast majority of people spend their days checking the latest news. However, one useful rule of thumb to assess the potential value of information is its age. Most of the news that comes out today will have almost zero value or importance past tomorrow. Nassim Nicholas Taleb says “to be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”¹⁷ Doing this highlights the unimportance and transience of the vast majority of the news.

In contrast, articles, books, or other content that still receives attention weeks, months, or years later is far more likely to offer lasting value. If you are seeking to improve your thinking, prioritize content that has withstood the test of time over continuously scanning for the latest updates. Books and other deeply thoughtful content are still the best source of expert, insightful thinking to learn or enhance your mental models.

Spend more time with content of proven value than you do with today’s ephemera.

If the bulk of your information activities are in scanning (and rescanning) the latest news, you will only be skimming the surface. Certainly, to keep abreast of change you need to scour for relevant updates as well as indulge in deeper dives into rich troves. Yet more than ever that is an activity fraught with danger, as misinformation, disinformation, and just straight-out bullshit fills our information sources.

Finding Gems Amid Bullshit

When University of Washington launched its Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data course in 2017, its 160-student capacity was booked out in one minute flat.¹⁸ The first course objective is to “remain vigilant for bullshit contaminating your information diet,” something we all need to be highly conscious of given its lavish presence in what we consume. Massive interest in the program has led to online courses for high school children and educators and an excellent book by the course instructors, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West.¹⁹

Not just spotting bullshit, but also positively identifying high-value information, must be core capabilities for everyone today. Since filtering has become so much harder, we need to apply our critical faculties using a content-filtering framework, as shown in Figure 3.1. There are three domains on which we need to focus: you, the source, and the content itself.

FIGURE 3.1 A Content Filtering Framework

Only you can assess the potential value of any given piece of content. The essential first question is whether it is sufficiently relevant to you to pay attention at all. We should appraise any information before making it part of our mental models, but we can only spend that time on what is important.

As we grow to understand cognitive bias, we need to be highly attentive to whether we want new information to be true. It is safe to assume you have political opinions. If you are like the vast majority of people, you gravitate more to articles that point to the deficiencies of politicians you don’t like than those you support. I’m certainly not immune. Being aware of our preconceptions allows us to be more critical in assessing content, whether it supports our views or conflicts with them.

A ready heuristic for the quality of content is the source, but we should also understand this is not an unfailing measure. The most credible newspapers in the world make mistakes, despite sometimes rigorous fact-checking standards, and editors are humans not immune to championing their beliefs. Even publication in a reputable scientific journal, which entails a thorough peer review, does not mean findings are correct. To take just Nature, by some measures the world’s most reputable journal, there were 49 retractions of published articles in the decade to 2021, and that doesn’t mean that every other article was completely correct.²⁰

It makes sense to filter for credibility at least as much by individual author as by publication. Many media outlets aggregate a broad range of content, sometimes to spark debate rather than as an endorsement. Develop opinions on who you consider reliable or untrustworthy.

On the other hand, you should treat with caution ideas from an unknown publication or author, and indeed verify that they are the source they profess. For years one of the major sources of shared misinformation was a website mimicking the URL and appearance of ABC News. Yet great ideas can come from outside the mainstream, so being unknown is not disqualifying.

Finally, you need to assess the content itself, going beyond the headline to the content, which is sometimes clearly satire or with deeply flawed logic. Most important of all, you need wherever possible to reference the original sources, or cross-check with other authorities.

Go to the Ultimate Source

Once, while searching for some data, I found an infographic containing a startling statistic. I was intrigued about the data point and where it came from, so scoured through the long list of references at the bottom of the chart, finding another infographic with the statistic, then in turn another. Following the thread eventually led me back to the original source. I had apparently stumbled upon an infernal loop of references to what appeared to be an invented data point with no credible provenance.

The most powerful single behavior to ensure you get quality information is developing the habit of always going to the source. You can be confident that most of what you find on the web has not been traced to the source by those sharing it. When cheap and quick content creation is the name of the game, no one bothers to check whether something they have seen is actually correct, creating an amplification loop in which any distortion—or sometimes invention—begins to be taken as gospel.

For anything important, always try to track back to the original information source.

I can’t tell you how many times in the course of researching this book I found a quote, anecdote, or statistic that was intriguing, which upon investigation either had been massively distorted or simply did not have an identifiable source. If you truly want to be well informed, any time you see something that interests or surprises you, endeavor to find the original source of the information and decide whether you trust where it came from. This is one of the most valuable information habits you can develop.

Of course, before we assess information, we need to choose the founts from which we drink. The ongoing fragmentation of information markets has afforded us a variety of portals to access our mental sustenance.

Selecting Your Portals

The visionary Marshall McLuhan decades ago insightfully described the media as an extension of our senses. You used to be only able to see and hear what was immediately around you. With hordes of professional journalists now complemented by billions of people brandishing powerful digital devices, every camera and microphone in the world extends your senses to whatever those armies experience and share.

We can now access much of the entire universe of information available, if we choose to bypass the now archaic filters imposed by mainstream media. The challenge is that this unleashes a tsunami of noise that inevitably drowns out the signals that matter to us.

It is not just information that has proliferated, but also the ways we can access it. We now have a wealth of options to learn what is happening. Rather than sources, we should think about “portals,” the doorways through which we discover information, each with distinctive characteristics in how they filter and aggregate inputs. Our five primary portals to information are shown in Figure 3.2.

FIGURE 3.2 Your Portals to Information

As the diagram illustrates, you can sometimes directly experience what is new. However, it is a very big world and you cannot be everywhere, so you will uncover much of what is new through media or the direct reporting of individuals. Media and individuals (if we can even distinguish between them these days) are our sources. In our increasingly disintegrated media landscape, we don’t necessarily go directly to these sources. In many cases we discover what is interesting to us through aggregators or feeds.

There is a critical distinction between feeds where we select the inputs and those that are shaped by algorithms. As we will see, sometimes those algorithms can be very useful, but in other cases they dramatically distort what we see and thus how we perceive the world. In the diagram, feeds can bring together both media sources and individuals. Media aggregators and social media are both based on algorithms, so it is important to understand how these algorithms select what they present to you and the implications for their role in your media diet.

Let us examine each of the portals through which you can access your information diet and how best to use them. First, we need to consider how to build a portfolio of information portals and sources that will best support your objectives.

Diverse Information Portfolios

Modern portfolio theory lies at the center of contemporary investment management. Originally proposed in 1952 by Harry Markowitz, who won a Nobel Prize for his insight, it remains in the core curriculum of every finance course. In essence it proves that if your portfolio is diversified, containing a range of investments that are not highly correlated in their performance, you will achieve a better overall return for the risk you take. Markowitz had mathematically verified the age-old adage “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

This principle also applies to other domains, including the information sources we use. In particular, there is a deep risk to our mental models in drawing on a narrow set of sources, especially those that are overly aligned in their political, social, or epistemic outlooks. There is more than one way to look at anything. We should adopt as a core precept the adage of influential social scientist Gregory Bateson: “Knowledge comes from but a single perspective; wisdom comes from multiple perspectives.”²¹

This might be most obviously the case in politics, where anything can be viewed through the diverse lenses of partisan beliefs. If all your input comes from sources with aligned political stances, it is almost impossible to form opinions that reflect your unique views and identity.

Less obviously, science also requires multiple frames. Some domains of science are essentially settled and agreed upon. As we push back the boundaries of our scientific knowledge, and sometimes come back to question what is already seen as established, brisk—or sometimes acrimonious—debates between thinkers are an integral part of advancing our collective understanding.

People who follow only a handful of prominent techno-optimists might believe that technology will inevitably cure the ills of society. Perhaps describing a greater proportion of the population, people who are continuously exposed to dire news about social and environmental issues may not ever see that there are potential solutions to the pressing problems of today.

The single most important factor in selecting your information sources is diversity.

The challenge and opportunity are to include highly varied sources in our regular information diet. In 2015 I started compiling a list of leading female futurists across all continents. The intent was to provide a resource for myself and others to identify incisive viewpoints beyond the usual suspects.²² You can find or compile for yourself similar lists of individuals or media outlets that offer thinking outside the mainstream. Where possible, include the most thoughtful sources that are likely to challenge your outlook.

Media

An increasing proportion of people never turn to a specific news site or broadcast program to find out what’s going on in the world. They find relevant news through social media, news aggregators, or their friends sharing links with them. Academics describe the phenomenon of not actively seeking news as the News Finds Me (NFM) perception.²³ While it can be used as a pejorative term, some of the most insightful and informed people I know essentially let information find them. “My approach is that things come by, and if they keep coming by, they’re probably important,” says Tim O’Reilly.²⁴

Those who were reading news-on-paper when they came of age are more likely to continue to go directly to a media brand they know and trust, whether they access it through the web, paper, television, or radio. Members of younger generations often only access media sources indirectly, through social media or aggregators.²⁵ If done thoughtfully that can provide an excellent range of relevant updates, but for many there is a place for accessing selected media directly.

Delegating Your Filtering

Do you want to read the same thing as many billionaires? Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and many of their peers consistently read the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Economist. They are delegating part of their information filtering, selection, and prioritization to the editors of those august publications. They absolutely use other media and sources, but as a starting point they believe those publications will provide solid coverage of the news that matters as well as useful context to those stories.

The promise of almost every mainstream news publication or program has been that it tells you what you need to know. By consuming it you are trusting the decisions of those editors on what news to include and how it is framed. Pre-internet that meant using a news source was in fact choosing who selected the news for you. Now that we have a plethora of news providers, the primary reason to go directly to the front page of a publication is either that you find value in its editorial choices or you trust the way it covers those stories.

The value can also be in understanding how that publication’s audience sees the world. Investor Josh Wolfe says his wife makes fun of him for reading USA Today in addition to all the “serious” newspapers. He responds, “Well, I need to read USA Today because I need to know whatever X million Americans are waking up in Marriotts and being influenced by.”²⁶ I have never owned a television, but when I have time free in a hotel room, I may turn to news channels that I wouldn’t normally see to discover what millions are watching.

Your selection of consistent news sources inevitably shapes you and how you see the world. You need to be conscious in those choices, and open to changing them if your priorities shift or the sources don’t fulfil their promised value to you.

Individuals

The rapid rise of the newsletter service Substack, which hit over 1 million paying subscribers in late 2021, points to a structural shift in how people filter information: they increasingly prefer to go to individuals rather than media institutions. The first wave of individual media came from blogging, online video, content-driven social networks, and podcasting. Now that a sufficient audience is proving happy to support creators directly, the media landscape is fragmenting even more.

This is an opportunity to be more granular in our sources by selecting people we trust. We can also simply choose to follow only individuals within larger media organizations by using feeds and filters. However, primarily going to individuals rather than media sources offers a heightened danger of being exposed only to those who think like you. Make sure to include the most thoughtful people with whom you disagree.

Investing in Your Personal Information Networks

My last corporate role before leaving to launch my own ventures was as global director of capital markets at Thomson Financial, which later merged with Reuters to form Thomson Reuters. My team provided real-time reporting and analysis on the global primary debt markets. Market participants were the source of essentially all our information. They shared it with us because of our relationships of trust. We engaged daily in barter of updates on what was happening behind the scenes in the markets, and more importantly, shared context and diverse perspectives on the transactions.

For many jobs “know-who” is as or more important than “know-how.” If you know who to ask, you don’t need the knowledge yourself. It is not just a question of knowing who to ask; it requires a relationship that results in people taking the time and effort to help you. Networks of knowledge are also networks of trust and reciprocity.

Top-ranked analyst and author R “Ray” Wang delves deep into technology trends and their implications. For that he relies on his personal networks. “The bigger your network, the more likely you can find someone within that network or at least a couple of degrees of separation,” he says. If there is a topic he wants to dive into, he reaches out to whoever in his network is most likely to give him the insights he needs.

Wang says the reason they accept his request for a meeting is to “pay it forward” within extended groups in which value is freely exchanged. “In case you have a question, or you want to know something, or whether it’s a job hunt, or whether it’s a tip, or whether something’s coming your way, there’s enough self-interest for you to want to be part of one of those groups,” he says.²⁷

This is described as “diffuse reciprocity,” in which you engage in mutual value exchange, not with individuals, but with members of a broader community. You might help someone who will help someone else who will help you. If you want to be able to tap the insights of the world’s top experts in a particular field, you should start by helping people like them where you can. If you assist others in their pursuit of insight, this will flow back to you. And of course, wherever possible, if you have a conversation, you want everyone involved to get at least as much value from it as you.

People can be your greatest source of insight, but for that, you need to invest in your personal information networks.

Leading venture capitalist Fred Wilson’s personal network is central to how he uncovers useful information. “I have several dozen friends who are always sending me things to read or watch or listen to,” he writes. “Many/most of these people do not work in tech but are hyper-curious and have great breadth of interest. They are my most valuable source of content and inspiration and I have cultivated these relationships over my entire adult life. This was not calculated or planned. It just happened.” His view is that “technology shows me things I already know about. Humans show me things I don’t know about.”²⁸

Sometimes we might call or message the right person directly, but today much of the insight being shared is within closed groups on platforms such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, and Signal. Insightful viewpoints on the topics of the moment can be found in voice conversations on Discord or Clubhouse, where Silicon Valley elite led the way for a diverse range of interesting thinkers to share their perspectives, often for anyone who cares to tune in.

Feeds

Dave Winer prefers the description “media hacker” to software developer, though software is his medium for impact. In 1994, soon after the World Wide Web was created, Winer helped San Francisco newspaper strikers automate their landmark online news site San Francisco Free Press.²⁹ His company UserLand Software followed up by launching the first user-friendly platform for blogging in 1997. Winer began developing a content-sharing protocol he called “Really Simple Syndication,” or RSS.

In 2000 Adam Curry, who had been a prominent VJ on MTV, flew into New York and invited Dave Winer to meet him in his room in what Winer describes as a “fancy rock star type hotel.” Curry passionately described his vision for a world in which not just blogs but also radio, music, other audio, or video could be distributed to the world. Winer was intrigued and adapted RSS to include an enclosure for audio. On January 20, 2001, the inauguration day of George W. Bush, Winer launched a feed containing U.S. Blues, Grateful Dead’s biting song on the state of America, to create the first audio RSS feed.³⁰ Two decades later, people listen to over 15 billion hours of podcasts every year, largely subscribed to through RSS feeds.

Syndication is a foundational element of the digital economy, enabling us to subscribe to receive updates whenever our favorite news sites, bloggers, podcasters, or video producers share new content. Services such as Twitter, Instagram, and their ilk at their core are feeds to follow the updates of people who interest you.

Finding 20 Good People

Technology evangelist and author Robert Scoble’s primary interface to information is Twitter interface Tweetdeck. Nestled among the seemingly boundless inanity on Twitter, many of the world’s leaders in their fields, in technology, media, science, and of course politics, share their insights, work, perspectives, and the most interesting content they encounter. To help us find the treasures amid the drivel, the list function of Twitter lets us define topics within which we only see the tweets of those we respect.

The issue is selecting who you follow. “You have to get to know the people you’re listening to. And that takes time,” says Scoble. “Make a list of 20 people that are really baller in this industry or the topic. If you’re trying to learn how to do pottery, you’d better know who Lynda Weinman is, she should be one of the 20 people on your list. And if she’s not, she will be pretty quick once you start building a list like this, because you’ll find the other 19 and then they’ll start saying, ‘hey, look at Lynda’s stuff.’ The world starts pointing you at these people, and that gets you up to date.”³¹

Many of the information masters I interviewed for this book mentioned numbers around 20 as a guideline scope for their tightly curated lists. “It’s a little bit of a shotgun approach to start with,” says “personal knowledge mastery” instructor Harold Jarche. “Start paying attention to what they’re doing. You can tune those signals; you can amplify the ones that are giving you good information, and you can decrease the noisy ones.”

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic Jarche created a Twitter list with just a dozen highly diverse sources he trusts who have all “gone a little bit against the mainstream.” He has added and taken away from this list but kept it contained. “Finding your limits becomes important as well. If you’re spending all your time seeking and reading, and not doing anything about it, that’s not very helpful.”³²

Setting Up Feeds

To bring together your selected sources you can draw on a wide range of RSS readers—for example, Feedly, Inoreader, or Newsblur. Some readers have useful features beyond simple aggregation, such as AI content selection, integration with note-taking apps, or filtering content by author or category.

You can also use platforms such as Google News to set up alert feeds for specific terms appearing in the news—for example, topics relating to your field of expertise. These surface all news items that include your terms. The risk is that these often provide too many results from sources of highly varied quality.

Social data innovator Marshall Kirkpatrick has set up (and shares on the web) Google custom search engines that each return results only from a curated set of sources. Rather than go to the entire web he can search within the sites he trusts. To ensure he draws on diverse sources he searches within Twitter lists he has created of underrepresented groups, such as Indigenous leaders and women in tech.³³

Newsletter subscriptions are effectively feeds into your email inbox, though you can use software tools to direct all your newsletters to a separate reader. Leslie Shannon, who works for Nokia scouting for relevant technology trends, uses newsletters extensively. “I’m paying somebody else to do the scanning for me . . . except the newsletters are free,” she says. The issue is in discovering and selecting which ones to read. “I will look at everything once,” she reports, but only to assess them. “I’m an unsubscribe monster . . . ruthless so that the things that come into my inbox, I know are things that I want to pay attention to.”³⁴

Algorithmic Input

Rampant technology has largely created the alarming surfeit of information we experience. But could the solution be in the problem? Can technology not also guide us to the information that is the most relevant to us? If the extraordinary capabilities of AI can be applied to learning our interests, it should be able to direct us to the information that will best serve us. The problem? Most algorithms are developed and applied, not to serve us, but to exploit us.

Algorithms can be immensely valuable in helping us identify the information we need. But we need to be very careful how we use algorithmic information discovery in recognizing the design intention of the algorithms as well as their quality. Algorithms shape what you see in your social media newsfeeds and on media aggregators, but the way they work in each channel is very different.

Social Algorithms

Yuval Noah Harari, author of bestselling books including Sapiens, does not mince words in describing the impact of social media algorithms. “Once you have an external outlier that understands you better than you understand yourself, liberal democracy as we have known it for the last century or so is doomed,” he says.³⁵

In November 2020, 48 percent of Americans aged 18–29 and 40 percent of 30–49-year-olds reported that social media was the most common way they accessed election news. Not surprisingly, these respondents proved to be less knowledgeable than others about current events and politics.³⁶

Most social media sites are based around their newsfeed, where their constantly refined algorithmic selections of content are crafted to make you spend more time on the site, engage with posts, come back frequently, and click on paid advertisements.

The realization that Facebook was exploiting negative emotions such as anger and envy to increase engagement is one of the factors prompting many millions to leave the site over the past years.³⁷ Yet many still find social media sites useful for a range of reasons, including keeping in touch with old friends.

For those who still find value on social media platforms, there are a few things you can do to give yourself a modicum of control. One way is to block the newsfeed entirely. Over 200,000 people have downloaded News Feed Eradicator, a browser extension that replaces the newsfeed of multiple major social networks with inspiring quotes, leaving all other functionality intact. There are, unfortunately, very limited options to edit the newsfeed on most social media services, save for Twitter where you can choose to see the most recent posts from those you follow rather than those selected by the platform.

Where you still have a degree of control is simply in only engaging with people or posts that you want to see more of in your stream. You can make people you follow more or less likely to appear through blocking or temporarily snoozing them. Never engage with content that gives you negative emotions such as outrage. If you do, you are falling into their trap and will see more things that enrage you. That is not a useful state of mind. If people share clickbait content, take them out of your stream; they are taking precious attention from you. More generally, it is safe to recommend that you minimize your engagement on social media.

Media Aggregators

What do Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai have in common? One thing is that they both rely on technology news site Techmeme to keep on top of the latest news in the industry, along with many of the top tech leaders and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and beyond.³⁸ The Techmeme page displays a constantly updated list of the most important news in the sector, based on the extent of discussion by those most influential in the community. If you are in tech, a visit to the site efficiently updates you on the latest news and offers reassurance that you’re not missing anything important.

The advent of Google News and more recently Apple News offers easy access to a compilation of news from a wide variety of publications that is sufficient for many people to feel they know what they need. Those who wish can dive into specific categories such as national politics, local news, science, sports, or even more precise tranches. These kinds of aggregators are primarily useful for anyone who just wants to be broadly aware of what’s happening in the world. One advantage is that the primary stream shows news across all categories, not just the ones you tend to follow, exposing you to a quick but broad view of what’s going on. However, they should not be considered sufficient for those wanting to go beyond the superficial.

User-driven aggregators such as Reddit’s subreddit groups and Hacker News for the startup community, which use algorithms based on member votes, can provide a useful view of what’s new and interesting on those topics. The comments sections, which also apply user voting to highlight the best and bury the worst, can at times provide thought-provoking perspectives.

Despite literally hundreds of attempts at creating personalized news aggregators in the hope of attracting legions of readers seeking a distillation of the news, most have hit the dust, many of them deservedly. I have long been disappointed in the personalization quality of the available news aggregators, though I hold hopes for the new emerging generation of tools.

Building Your Information Portfolio

Popular internet culture columnist Taylor Lorenz, writing for the New York Times and then the Washington Post, has a media diet that matches her distinctive job. “I’m basically consuming information all day on whatever app I’m using,” she reports. “I follow lots of Instagram accounts, check out the Explore page, spend about an hour or two per day on TikTok or watching YouTube.”

She looks to her community for content recommendations. “I have a Twitter list of people I follow and just read whatever links they tweet out that seem interesting. I also read links dropped in a variety of group chats and Slack groups.” Other than selected news recap podcasts, she goes consistently to only one publication, reading the Daily Mail homepage “top to bottom several times per day.”³⁹

Your information portfolio will likely be markedly different from Lorenz’s. Yet, as she has, you need to establish a consistent set of portals and habits that support your objectives. These will include daily routines as well as some sources accessed less regularly.

Consider a long-term cryptocurrency investor. To meet her information needs, she will likely set up feeds from the major specialist crypto news services or potentially consistently visit a few of the sites directly, complementing this with subscriptions to a handful of the most insightful sector newsletters. Since many crypto pundits and experts are on Twitter, she will keep an eye on a list compiled by someone she respects or set up her own list of those she finds most intriguing.

If she is concerned about the outlook for cryptocurrency regulation, she will set up a web-wide alert for specific search terms, or a narrower filter drawing only relevant news from a set of credible mainstream publications. She may regularly visit one of the online communities where the core crypto developers hang out to keep abreast of progress on the crypto platform road maps.

A sophisticated supply chain executive will have a very different portfolio, including a dashboard of internal information on the state of the company’s logistics, headlines from major news outlets across different regions of the world, industry-specific sections of media aggregators, and perhaps major weather alerts. He will also have a feed or selected set of sources to keep informed on the latest developments in transport, warehousing, sensor technology, 3D printing, and other advances that may impact his operations; however, he will most likely check this less frequently.

Review your information purposes and start with a blank slate. If you were setting up your information portfolio from scratch, what portals would be most important? Which outlets, if any, are worth going to directly? Can any media aggregators be useful, perhaps with some setup? If you choose to build feeds of media or individuals, how will you select the sources? Should social media play a role other than for your socializing?

As for financial portfolios, you should regularly rebalance depending on the demands of your role and continual reassessment of the quality and value of the information you are getting. Beyond the portals and sources you choose, you also need to intelligently select the media formats that suit you.

Your Mix of Media Formats

The rise of digital communication has yielded a cornucopia of ways to consume information, education, and entertainment. None of these options replaces old favorites such as print, television, and radio, but add to them to offer us myriad choices.

In the same way that we need to be conscious in filtering, we should make deliberate choices on the media formats we use, rather than rely on the default of what is easy or habitual. There is no optimal prescription for the balance of formats because it is a deeply personal choice. It depends not only on your cognitive style and preferences, but also on your daily routine, the devices you use, and when you choose to engage with information.

Don’t assume that what you’re doing now is the best way. Try different approaches and see if you can find better alternatives. Let’s consider the factors that drive your selection of media formats across the major alternatives of print, audio, video, and a proliferating assortment of digital screens.

Choosing Your Media

There are in essence two types of media: those that let us choose our pace and those that lock our attention to the flow. Part of the magic of the written word is that you can vary your reading pace from very fast to very slow, depending on how deeply you wish to engage with the text. Books, newspapers, newsletters, and articles can be absorbed in precisely the way that suits you.

With audio or video, you are locked to the pace it unfolds. Many people speed up audio, using exercise or commuting time to listen to podcasts or articles. Untrained people are rarely comfortable beyond one and a half times normal speed, though vision-impaired people and some who have undertaken specific training can listen with good comprehension to audio at triple or more normal speed.⁴⁰ Listening faster is not necessarily better, since it consumes more attention (which is fine for the gym but not highly compatible with some other tasks such as driving) and can induce stress. The point is to thrive, not to make your information intake unpleasant.

Audio is certainly a viable substitute to text; however, often the real value of audio and video are in their greater emotional engagement and thus ability to integrate into your thinking. Compare the impact of watching or listening to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech to that of reading it. I find I register insights when listening to podcasts that I miss when reading the transcripts.

Print Versus Screen

Print on paper boasts a plethora of advantages, including zero boot time, high legibility in varied lighting, pleasing aesthetics, no need to recharge, tolerance to beach and bath conditions, and not disrupting airplane navigation systems. Indeed, our lasting love for print books suggests they will be with us for decades to come. In 2021 over 825 million print books were sold in the United States, the most since the rise of e-books, and more than four times digital format sales.⁴¹ For a little while yet we can also opt to read major newspapers on paper, and we can print out digital content if we choose.

Indeed, while the many studies comparing comprehension from reading print and digital formats yield varied results, they tend to come down on the side of print, largely due to superior visual ergonomics.⁴² In addition, reading print is inherently a more focused format than on digital devices, which all too readily allow our attention to stray.

On the other hand, digital texts offer myriad advantages, not least in being able to search through all the notes, articles, and books you have read, copy phrases into other documents, and of particular delight to frequent travelers, carry an unlimited number of books on expeditions.

Since note-taking is vital to comprehension and assimilation, a key factor in selecting reading format is how well it suits your approach to note-taking. Blogger and curator Maria Popova recently renamed her website The Marginalian, referring to taking notes in the margins of books. Yet she reads in digital formats, exporting her notes to Evernote for sense-making and searching.⁴³

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen reads print extensively, shaping how he highlights the text. “When there’s something interesting in the book I underline it,” he says. “And then if it’s really interesting, I dog-ear the page that it’s on. And then there’s a few books that I’ve read where it’s like, they destabilize the piles of books because I’ve dog-eared every single page and now the book is crooked. And the books on top of it will, like, tip over at some point.”⁴⁴

Many people find that they can more easily reference and recall notes in print books, since our cognition often uses spatial references. Investment strategist Michael Mauboussin reports that “my own mental recall tends to do much better with physical assets than it does with electronic. Even though I know I could search for it electronically, I feel more comfortable with it in the physical form.”⁴⁵

Information Is More than Content

You may have heard the oft-quoted phrase that “a weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in 17th century England.”⁴⁶ A startling statement, and utter rubbish. In fact, the average Englishman of a few hundred years ago may have soaked in more information about his environment each day than most Americans of the early twenty-first century, by actually perceiving what was around him rather than filtering out everything but the mobile phone screen in front of him. It’s just that the information he came across wasn’t necessarily contained in words or videos.

If you limit your understanding of the world to what you can read or watch on a screen, you will have no true knowledge. Certainly, we need to draw on the information and insights from the oceans of media that we can access. But the most insightful people actively look around them every day for the signals that help them make sense of the world.

Landing in Bangkok on his travels as a marketer for a toothpaste brand, Dietrich Mateschitz hopped on a tuk-tuk motorcycle rickshaw to get through the traffic-bound city. He noticed that all the drivers were drinking the same beverage to keep awake through their long days. He reached out to the owner of the company, negotiated worldwide rights, and launched Red Bull, which now sells almost 8 billion cans a year, more than one for every person on the planet.⁴⁷

The Power of Curation

In medieval England a curate was responsible for the care of the souls of those in his parish, guiding them to the messages that would lead to their salvation. In following centuries, “curator” began to be used to describe those selecting the most worthy art to appear on the walls of museums.

It was only in the 1990s that cultural aspirants appropriated the word to describe the selection of DJs at a nightclub, sneakers in a shoe store, books of the month, or news articles.⁴⁸ With the advent of social media a generation of newborn curators began sharing with the world their favorite media links, images, videos, or memes. For some it became not only a livelihood, but also a source of fame and influence.

In his twenties Matt Drudge worked in a series of convenience and gift stores until his father bought him a computer to help him get his career on track. Drudge started sending out emails with news links to a handful of his friends. His subscribers blossomed and he launched a website, Drudge Report. Drudge rapidly grew attention through scoops from his network of contacts, being the first to report on what would become the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but people mainly came to his site for his links to mainstream news sites, often accompanied by brief, excoriating comments.

While more recently people’s media habits have shifted, as recently as 2014 Drudge Report was the single largest source of web traffic to the likes of CNN, Fox News, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal, far ahead of Facebook or Twitter. Readers didn’t go directly to the news sites to browse; they trusted Drudge’s selection of news articles to point them to what they should read. Drudge was an early leader in the burgeoning world of content curation, unleashed by the advent of the internet.

To thrive on overload, it is not essential to be a content curator, but it can be enormously helpful. As you uncover the information and ideas that help you achieve your personal objectives, all it takes is sharing from among the content you encounter what you think might be useful to others.

One reason to do so is as a contribution to others. In my 2002 book Living Networks I lauded those who were “bringing the networks to life” by connecting ideas and people, contributing to communities, and helping us be collectively more intelligent by surfacing worthwhile content for others.⁴⁹ If you have discovered something useful to you, it will undoubtedly be useful to others.

I also noted, “If you help bring the networks to life . . . you will create success for yourself.”⁵⁰ By donating your insight to the world with minimal effort, you can also bring substantive benefits to yourself, many of which will directly support your purpose and expertise development.

Consistently sharing useful information and insights can bring you immense benefits.

There are four primary outcomes of sharing insights from your quotidian information explorations:

1.   Hone your filtering skills. The most important reason to curate publicly is to improve your skills at filtering. To select relevant content, you need to be clear on your area of expertise or interest and have begun to build your own frameworks to make sense of the space. These will help you determine what is truly interesting to your specific audience. Moreover, the challenge of having followers makes you consider more deeply whether content is insightful and its import.

2.   Demonstrate expertise. As you intelligently parse information, your rapidly developing expertise will have immediate application to your work. Your peers will see the depth of your knowledge, creating trust and helping them consider you an authority.

3.   Boost visibility. For your expertise to have the greatest impact it needs to be seen and recognized. Those who share insights along their ongoing learning journeys become far more visible in their areas of knowledge, known and readily able to be found.

4.   Build relationships. The leading experts in almost any given field, those who are pushing the boundaries and not relying on past knowledge, learn alongside a group of peers. Disproportionately, those who are in the vanguard share freely and are open to input and ideas from all sides. Tracking and sharing their insights can not only ratchet up your own understanding, but also build valuable relationships.

There are of course costs to sharing your insights with others as you develop your frameworks and mental models, primarily of time and focus. While the time required for sharing content is not high, if you share on social channels, it is also worth interacting with those who engage with your content. That often has value in itself, but it does take a finite investment of time. Another important factor is that it can divert you from your current attention mode, so where possible bookmark what you find for later sharing.

Inbound Filtering

Judiciously selecting a balanced portfolio of portals and sources lets us maximize the valuable signal from a world of noise. It gives us choice and versatility in how we access information, offering us a daily diet that can nourish without overwhelming us.

At the same time as we discern what is worth pulling toward us, the world is pushing information and demands for our attention at us at a fiendish rate. All while we venture forth seeking what is precious, we are being bombarded with messages of dubious value. To prosper we need to filter these messages efficiently and effectively, leaving our minds as unencumbered as possible.

Some basic principles always apply, including blocking ads, consistently unsubscribing from all but the most valuable emails, guiding your colleagues to communicate on your preferred collaboration platforms, and where possible using human or AI filters to prioritize messages. However, the real nub of the issue is setting explicit rules on what merits your attention.

Your Rules for Saying Yes

Yes is the most powerful word in the English language. It can open up immense new possibilities. But if you say yes to everything you will inevitably be overwhelmed, and not able to seize the most compelling opportunities. So, in fact to truly say yes to the right possibilities, you have to say no far more than you say yes. Establishing specific rules minimizes time and effort; they clearly indicate what merits a positive response.

Everyone is deluged with requests, especially those whose success has made them visible to others. Almost all requests you will receive are for one of three things: your time, your money, or your relationships.

Most people get requests for their time, whether it is to take a real-world or virtual meeting; to look at a website, article, app, or book; or to speak or do an interview. Others ask for access to your relationships, either introductions to people you know or by sharing on social media what they want to promote.

How tightly you define your filtering rules will depend on how deluged you are with inbound requests. Anyone working in venture capital will inevitably be swamped with messages from startup founders. Professional investors set and often publish precise criteria to merit even a second glance at a proposal, which swiftly winnows the deluge.

If you provide contact information on the internet, clearly describe your guidelines for getting a response. Cal Newport, author of Deep Work and more recently A World Without Email, calls these “sender filters” that reverse the burden of responsibility, asking those sending you messages to first assess whether these meet your filtering criteria, and set expectations for whether or what kind of reply they may receive.⁵¹

Tim Urban of the blog Wait But Why describes what to expect for the different kinds of messages he receives, noting that “you may or may not hear back from us, depending on a lot of things.” On author and podcaster Tim Ferriss’s website he gives clear instructions on everything he will not respond to, and how you can engage with him.

A central element of your inbound filtering process is defining your potential responses. Only unmitigated enthusiasm should yield a yes; don’t commit yourself if you feel half-hearted. If there isn’t enough information to make a decision, communicate clearly what you need. Create templates of gracious responses explaining your existing commitments. And don’t feel you need to respond to thoughtless messages.

EXERCISES

Content Filtering Framework

Try consistently applying the framework shown in Figure 3.1 earlier in this chapter as you scan and assess your information sources for one day. Which of the questions are most useful? Which come most into play? How will this change your information habits?

Selecting Information Portals

What information portals will you prioritize? For each portal indicate the approximate proportion of your attention you will allocate and within each your primary sources or tools.

Personal Information Networks

In which domains of expertise should you develop high-value personal information networks?

What action will you take to build them?

Filtering Inbound Requests

What filtering rules will merit a yes to inbound requests?