Information Diet

One question I get a ton that I've been wanting to address and I will in the forthcoming post, hopefully is around Information Diet. So what do you read? How do we read it? And of course we're always looking forward to hearing what you guys are reading. So add it to the chat when we email it in and then we can talk. Maybe some business entrepreneurship stuff.

So information diet is a term that people use a lot, but they use it in different ways. For me, it's about being really conscious with what I consume. Because one thing that is really easy online is that you can just consume things all day long. And then you look back at your last week and you're like, I've gotten nothing done. But I read a lot of blogs and there's no point to that in many ways. I mean, let me put it this way. Anyone can be a consumer, but a very small percentage of people can be a producer. And producer could be producing interesting blog posts, art, music, whatever. It's really easy to be just another consumer, but it's very difficult to be a producer. And I think fundamentally that's where people can get others attention by producing really good content. So that's kind of the way I think about information at what do you think?

So I wrote down some notes and I do it in a fourth minute post. So I think my take on information is like, some people are really good consumers of information, some are not so good, some people synthesize really quickly, some not so quickly, some people read really quickly, some not so quickly. So if you're the type of person who can process a lot of information, the web has been this boon because there's so much stuff out there that you can read. You could spend all day really interesting in blogs and articles, but so there's way more stuff. And most people on this webcast are like that, right? They're committed to like self improvement. They love reading finance blogs, entrepreneurship blogs, and the questions like, how do you parse through this shit? How do you decide what's worth your time to read? So I thought I would just go through a few buckets of information I consume kind of philosophically. I start with a premise like I don't think keeping up day to day.

With stuff is very efficient.

So keeping up with the day to day news, I think it's usually like overkill or keeping up with every single blog post or every single blog you read I think is overkill. So I try to think about how can I find sources that provide digest or weekly or monthly summaries of things. So example, the Economist magazine provides a weekly summary of the news.

Or the Atlantic.

Wait, wait. Before you go, how everyone who reads the economy such a snob about reading. I think an attack company Delicious about the snob Economist. I published in London, so I magazine but I need more invest.

But anyway, all right, so my sources.

Of information first is rss, right? So all of you hopefully have an RSS reader. I separate my RSS feed into three categories. High priority feeds, medium priority feeds, low priority feeds. I have 60 feeds in my high priority folder, 50 feeds in my medium priority, 40 feeds in my low priority. That kind of updates somewhat regularly. Once a day, usually after I work out, as I'm cooling off, I'll go through my high priority feeds and then maybe four times a week I'll go through my medium and low priority stuff. And my high priority feeds are mostly people I know or find that I want to stay on top of as well as other great sources of content. The medium and low priority is usually higher volume blogs that I don't necessarily want to get through. So that's my RSS reader. Some of the meta feeds that I subscribe to talking about meta stuff is like Slate magazine, Slate.com has a great feature like twice a week called Other Magazines where they just summarize what's in all the magazines. Like they'll go through Vanity Fair and Time and Newsweek and the Economist and like pull out the best article from those magazines. That's pretty efficient.

It's good.

Or like Amazon's blog. Amazon has a blog called Omnivoratious where every Monday they go and they summarize all the books that were reviewed in the Sunday newspaper. Small country. So if you don't want to keep up with the book review sections, it's right there. Then on Twitter, Twitter is another source of information, part of the diet. I follow 150people on Twitter. I check that a few times a day, usually when a month ago. I'm not concerned about missing anything and usually that's staying in touch with friends. And then print magazines I subscribe to the Economist, the Atlantic, and then we're both in airports a lot. So I have a whole category of magazines that I buy only in airports. So I buy New Yorker, Vanity Fair, a few others, Edgar Boards. And then books are the last source of information. So I think books, as I practice, I say, have the highest wisdom density of any medium and often be better off not following the news and reading more books. So I read about a book a week usually when I'M on an airplane.

Got it.

So that's kind of some.

So I'm just trying to synthesize what's the takeaway from the way you read. I mean, first of all, it's very.

Personal, the stuff you read.

And you actually have a pretty structured way around it. Structured yet loose. Meaning you've got high priority, low priority feeds. You read Twitter on the go, but at the same time sometimes you just read X or Y in the airport.

I also think like high level. I consider like I believe in high information. I don't believe in like you should just outsource all your information gathering perhaps. Like if you're at a dinner party, you shouldn't let someone tell you what the news is.

So very independent.

That's right, right. I think that's where my disagreement. But I think that's I like self identify somebody who can process a lot of information quickly. And so if I didn't feel like I could read quickly or something, I would probably outsource it. Like I say, Ramit, tell me what's going on.

So anyway.

A lot of people rely on me to send them interesting articles, thinking that's just like a role that I've assumed. So I think figure out, do you process information quickly? Can you read quickly, desynthesize? No big deal one way or the other. But if you can, then consuming a lot of information I think can be a good investment.

That's interesting what you said. Realize what your style is. I think a lot of times we feel that we should read certain things and there's all these blogs and frankly these magazines that are so high level and people say I really should read the Economist or whatever and if that's your style, great. I read the Economist because I frankly don't find it very interesting and it's just not my style. However, I read other things that I find super interesting and I know, okay.

I'm not going to have to force myself to do it.

At the same time, don't let this be an excuse for some of the lazy asses that I'm sure are watching. They're like, I read one book every two years. That's great. I'm so in the news. No, I agree 100%. Maybe we're both authors, but books are in my mind simply the high density use of information. I mean, look at authors, right? We spend years writing a book and you can pick it up for 10 bucks and learn everything that we spent years on. To me, that's a great use of time and it's funny. I was reading this post the other day about how to save money on books, which I thought totally missed the point because for me, if a book saves me $10,000 or earns me $10,000 or lets me meet an interesting type of person that down the road is going to help my career or whatever, it's just intellectually interesting, then it's worth almost an infinite amount of money. So to me, saving money on books is something that personally, I don't buy that. That's something I strategically spend a lot of money all the time. Amazon, Amazon Prime, Airports. I bought a book yesterday. I read on the plane home on overeating. That's going to generate a ton of interesting stuff, whether it's blog posts or, you know, you have some wheat. Yeah, I'm having a lot of diet issues. I will say that he doesn't eat.

Enough, so we try to feed him.

As much as we can. Thank you. That's why we're doing this in my kitchen, to get the spirit up.

But I also want to say one thing that once told me is like, the what you know is important. So everyone goes around saying it's not what you know, it's who you know. And like, who you know matters.

But I also think you have to.

Like, keep up with what's going on. You have to have views on things and books are a great way to improve. You know. Oren also has this great one about creating an expert bet. So like, if you can become really knowledgeable about something, you can be somebody expert on that topic. Right. So remit for thousands of people, you're their expert on personal finance. And for like a lot of like business people I know well, for whatever.

Reason, like I'm their expert on like.

Education or youth issues and I try to keep up on those things because they usually email me and ask for my thought on that. And so if you can develop a couple niches where you read most of.

The books in the field, you read.

All the blogs, you're up to date, and you can become an expert on a topic for people. You don't even have to be objectively an expert. All it means to be an expert is to know more than the person who's going to you for advice. So you kind of create that relative effect.

You know, it's funny, a lot of people we're getting questions, by the way, you can Submit them through twitter.com, submit it to Ramit RMIT or email to Ramit that I will teach to be rich. This chat Room is flaky, I don't know what's going on. So questions either twitter.com ramit or ramitishyoulish. So we're getting a lot of questions. It's funny because sometimes people will send these questions like what's a Roth ira? And first of all, I want to kill them because why don't you read my damn blog? The second, there are these general topical questions where you can become your own personal expert. You can know enough. You can know more than 80% of people in like three hours of research. Go online, go to Wikipedia, search on Google, read the first 10 results and follow the links and you can get pretty good. Which always mystifies me that why don't there's something really interesting to you or something that you're about to interview for a State Department position and you need to know about the Middle East. Well, spend a day and learn by reading the first 10 results of Google. It's quite easy. So that's something that I would urge taking action. Also, I want to mention you and I read a couple of the same magazines which are totally fascinating. I think the Atlantic Monthly, love it. Vanny third, people think it's a women's magazine. Yeah, yeah. Now this is a recent phenomena.

So when I was in Columbia, the bureau of the Mexico City bureau chief of the Economist was part of our delegation. We were like, don't talk about journalism and shit. And he mentioned Vanity Fair. And I'd only occasionally see Vanity Fair pieces like Michael Lewis thing on Iceland, which is excellent. Or what he's explained to me is Vanity Fair is half celebrity nonsense. But they also have tons and tons of money. So they pay big name writers like Mark Bowden, who's the head thing on the New York Times Company and again, Michael Lewis, he's probably getting paid like $7 a word, right? Like a 5,000 word piece. So they have come to my end and hey, Christopher Hitchens write the monthly column. So it's actually high quality. So it's not just celebrity gossip.