I'm back in your inbox today to talk about something important...
How many hours per day do you spend consuming content?
Be honest.
Add up all the time spent reading articles, books, and newsletters. The podcasts you listen to, the YouTube videos you watch, and the TikToks you're glued to. Don't forget the courses you take, the shows you watch, and the social media feeds you scroll.
Put all that together and what do you have? Most likely, a sizable percentage of your waking hours. A recent study shows that globally, people spend 6 hours and 58 minutes staring at screens each day.
You probably treat consuming content like it's your job, except no one is paying you to do it. In fact, you are paying to do it. If not with money, then with your time and attention (two of the most precious resources you have).
I have a simple question for you:
What are you getting back in return for that tremendous investment? What do you have to show for it?
Perhaps some of it is for entertainment, and there's nothing wrong with that. But there was something more you wanted than to be amused, wasn't there?
Didn't you choose what to consume because it was supposed to make you smarter, healthier, or more productive? Didn't someone promise a better life or career if you just dedicated yourself to learning?
In theory, we have access to the sum total of humanity's knowledge through the Internet. In theory, we can find any answer to any question we can think to ask, and many we didn't think to ask. In theory, we can learn anything and achieve anything using the most sophisticated technological tools ever conceived, right in our pockets.
But in practice, we can't.
We have learned through painful experience that access to information makes no difference. In fact, consuming more and more information only increases the paradox of choice, making it difficult to make any decision at all because our options never stop proliferating.
Knowledge is only power when we use it. When we forge it into a hammer and strike at the problem, the challenge, or the bottleneck that is keeping us from the future we seek.
Learning something is only the first step – and the last step if we don't do something with it…
- How many pieces of advice have you received over the years – and how much of it have you applied?
- How many other people's opinions have you taken in – and do you have one of your own?
- How many brilliant ideas have you had or considered – and have any of them left the realm of your imagination and seen the light of day?
If you're not happy with your answers, it's probably because you've been "information hoarding." Maybe you've been stockpiling information as a coping mechanism, not for any useful purpose. Information can become like a security blanket, smothering you in its soft, soothing embrace so you never have to venture outside.
Information is useful and wonderful, but if you expose yourself to too much of it, it becomes a poison.
You can feel the effects of that poison coursing through your bloodstream if you look closely. It feels like a nervous system too wired to sleep at night, but too exhausted to stay awake during the day. It's dopamine receptors so fried that only the most outrageous, sensationalistic headlines even register. It's that feeling of being hollowed out by too many pressing demands and too many incoming inputs, all shoved right up against your prefrontal cortex because they have nowhere else to go.
Your relationship to information may just be killing you.
But in this case, the poison is also the cure, because information can also save you. Specifically, this information: your brain was not meant to live in our current world.
Your brain developed in a totally different, prehistoric environment in which you probably would have consumed less information in a lifetime than you currently absorb every week. You have to understand that no amount of self-optimization – no memory technique or productivity system or mindset shift – can help you as long as it only depends on your fragile biological brain.
The only way out is to go beyond the body. To expand our mental capacity beyond the limits of our own minds. This isn't science fiction or artificial intelligence – it's possible today. It's not just a theory or concept – thousands of people around the world have already figured it out.
I invite you to try it for yourself and build a Second Brain – a trusted place outside your head where you can collect and organize your most important ideas and insights (while filtering out the junk) and use them to do your best work.
I'm curious…in your own words, how would adopting a Second Brain transform your approach? Hit reply to let me know.
Best,
Tiago
P.S. Having a Second Brain is like having a personal library in your pocket, helping you achieve your goals and remember everything you need.
I invite you to watch the first 3-minute lesson of my course BASB Foundation.
You'll find out how a Second Brain can help you:
- Find information quickly
- Organize your knowledge effectively
- Preserve your best thinking
- Make connections across different areas of your life
- Focus on creative work
- Trust your system to manage the details
