Shanli Liu argues that consuming content without changing your behavior isn't learning, it's wasted time. Intelligence is how fast you shift what you do when faced with the same situation. Before you finish that podcast or book, ask yourself what you'll actually do differently.
Every person who's listening to this right now has listened to 1,000 fucking podcasts and they're in the exact same condition, and yet they have not changed their behavior, which means, one, they have not learned, and two, they are dumb. Learning means same condition, new behavior. Intelligence is rate of learning. It means how many times do you need to be exposed to the same condition in order to change your behavior? Which also means that if you can control your behavior, you can also control how intelligent you are. And so if you want to be a smart cookie, you just decrease the amount of times that you do not change your behavior under the same conditions. And so every time you watch or you consume a piece of content, you read a book, if you think, what behavior am I going to change as a result of this? If the answer is nothing, you wasted your time and you pretended to be learning, but you were really entertaining yourself.
