| 0. Before starting, ask yourself whether this is worth reading. 99% of stuff out there is not, and you want to figure that out before you spend half an hour on it. You may want to learn to speed read for this reason; if it can be speed read it's probably too shallow to be worth it. 1. Articles and posts are the worst length for information. Tweets work great because they distill wisdom in only a few words, and super successful people have time to spare writing them. Books are ideal, because they can explore a topic inside out, whereas an article has to stop or doesn't have room to come to terms. 2. Podcasts and videos are poor for the same reason. Elite people rarely have time to do them. 3. In this era, it's become really common to write for the purpose of marketing a service or getting a job. Avoid places where people do this, e.g. LinkedIn, Medium, DEV. 4. When in doubt, don't read it. If it's important, you'll see several references to the same thing. 5. Improve your comprehension. It takes active, tiring, effort to get it up. I'd say 90% comprehension is a good goal, but even 50% is fine. Long story short, the brain is not designed to comprehend words. It comprehends pictures great. So you want to train your brain to convert words to pictures in milliseconds. A lot of great mathematicians think in diagrams, not formulas. That way you can take on harder books. 6. Follow what you're interested in now, don't structure it too much. A lot of books refer some interesting ideas to other books. Don't be afraid to drop a book and jump to another one. I've probably only read a few pages in Tools of Titans. Mostly it's been a reference to find better books. You also know very different things to other people; the books that fascinate you are different to the ones that fascinate others. |