How to process overwhelming content?

As someone who spends A LOT of free time consuming content, and has over the past few years, I get you. It can be tough to see so many things that seem valuable and deal with the feeling of "not seeing it."

I have a couple pieces of advice around this:

1. Accept that there is billions and billions of content out there and there is no way to consume everything. Instead, view your life as a journey. Focus on progress over perfection. If you're growing, you're doing something right.
2. With the fact that there are billions and billions of content out there, you'll also realize that a lot of it is repeated. So if you miss something, realize that you'll probably see the same thing next week, next month, or next year.
3. Constantly assess whether the things you consume are actually providing any value in your life. You get out what you put in. So if you consume a bunch of content but don't actually do anything with it or change your habits, then its a waste. So either change your habits along with the consumption, or find something else that's productive to do with that time.

I hope this helps!

On top of the excellent high-level advice around learning and content consumption from Jordan and Xue, I recommend the following: For everything you consume, extract a list of action items from it.

At the end of the day, reading or watching something insightful feels great but activating some neurons in your brain doesn't inherently accomplish anything. The magic happens when you turn these neuron activations into concrete behavior change.

For example, let's say you watch the following masterclass: [Masterclass] How To Have Impactful 1 on 1 Meetings

Here's some examples of action items you could derive from it:

• Write an agenda for my upcoming manager 1 on 1 at least 24 hours before the meeting and tell them about it
• Start a recurring biweekly 1 on 1 with my tech lead
• Set up Fireflies.ai and start adding it to all my meetings to take notes

From there, but a reminder 1 week out where you follow up yourself on whether you accomplished these action items. If you did, and you repeat this cycle with everything you consume, you'll become a rockstar in no time! 🚀

I talk more about maximizing your growth from content consumption here: "How do you manage knowledge you gain from reading?"

I'm going to take an extract from one of my LinkedIn posts that offers a different way to look at content consumption. The punchline is to be selective on when you choose to go deep on something and don't feel any guilt dropping off at any of the checkpoints I outlined below.
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Prioritize internalizing ideas and concepts.**

Here's my approach to optimize for this instead of other vanity metrics such as "word per minute" or "number of books completed", which in the end don't matter.

I sequentially work through each step below and feel no guilt stopping at any of the steps if it is no longer optimal for the overall goal of "internalizing ideas and concepts".
▶ Scan the table of contents
▶ Skim a few reviews or watch a video summary at 2-3X speed
▶ Read a book summary using service such as Shortform or Blinkist
▶ Do a 15 min session with ChatGPT to drill into interesting concepts I discovered in the prior steps that I want further explore
▶ Read the intro chapter and comb the index to find those concepts I still curious about
▶ The content is usually really good if I make it to this stage, so I would read the book and when I'm not visually consuming it, I'd listen to the audiobook for additional "reps / iterations"
▶ Buy the physical book and put a reminder in my calendar to revisit the content down the road (usually varying from 3-18 months)

Hey! I totally get it.

There's tons of content out there to consume. You'll never be able to consume a 100% of the materials out there as new content is being created every day.

What are your goals? What would you like to learn? Try to narrow it down and seek out those materials.

If something resonates with you, my advice is to have a bookmarking system or a collection. I have a Notion page of all the articles/tutorials/guides that I find interesting and want to refer back on.

Regular review also helps.

Why do you feel the need to know everything all at once? We're all learning.

Hope that helps.

I totally get this, especially as someone who's directly responsible for the overwhelming-ness of it all 😅. Taro is currently a giant grab-bag of everything ever, and we need to do a much better job with curated recommendations and personalization.

In the meantime, I recommend 2 major Taro tactics:

• Just ask for resource recommendations - Literally post a question like the one you made just here and see what the community recommends whenever you have a problem or have found a new skill you want to get better at. For the recommendations on Taro, create a "TODO" playlist and spend 1-2 hours a week going through them one-by-one until you're done.
• Meet people - Opt into the Orbiit.ai 1 on 1 matches, go through the #member-matching, and #intros channel on the Taro Premium Slack, and come to the relevant and more personal events like Group Talks and Group Office Hours. Your goal should be to find an accountability partner within the community where you can exchange tactics and suggest follow-up action items to improve in your career like we talk about in our video here: Not Getting Stuff Done? Find Someone To Call You Out