You Only Know What You Make

Thiago, tell me about this idea of you only know what you make.

This is an idea that advocates thinking of learning and working. Usually we think of those as two phases, two stages. I'm gonna learn, learn, learn, learn, learn. Then I'm gonna work, work, work, work, work. You look how modern lives are structured. You have this learning stage from three or four years old until you're 22 or 24 or 26, depending on your degree. And then you're, quote, unquote, done learning. You're finished, supposedly. And then you go into working, and you're supposed to work decades and decades with learning being maybe occasional side interest. That doesn't make any sense anymore. The world is changing way too fast. Our lives are changing way too fast. So I think the best way to combine those two is to think of the best way to learn as making something. When you make something, when you get your hands dirty, when you start really dealing with the practical difficulties, the defects in your understanding instantly come to light. You think, oh, I know how to make, let's say, a table, right? In your head, they might seem very simple. Oh, you just have a flat surface. Get a flat piece of wood, and then you get these pointy parts, and you stick them in the corners, and then you nail stuff or screw them, and you're done. The concept of a table is exceedingly simple, right? The concept of anything, really. But then you start, and I have my memories of just trying to put together IKEA furniture. It's amazing how many ways that can go wrong, right? You start to realize, oh, my gosh, there's thousands, hundreds or thousands of tiny little details and things that you need to know even to assemble, much less make a piece of furniture. So by making something, suddenly your mental model, the concept of a table, collapses, and you have to build a better model in its place that has all this extra detail.

When I look at your work and follow your evolution, where I see this most is with you and your book summaries. You have gone in half a decade from consuming books in the traditional way. I'm gonna read the book, I'm gonna put it down. Then slowly starting to save notes and making highlights, capturing them into your second brain, to now diving into the idea and getting into the nucleus of it, where you can see the idea through, like, a kaleidoscope of perspectives, then having to write a summary that makes you actually grapple with the ideas, and then to try to write the very best book summaries that you can tell me about that process and why it's been so beneficial for your learning.

Yeah, this has been an interesting journey. You know, I used to pride myself on the quantity of books that I read. You know, I had my streaks on my Kindle. How many weeks have you read in a row? How many pages? At the end of every year, I would look on Goodreads and count how many and then set a new goal for the next year to read even more books. But I think at some point, and this took a while for me to realize, I would just look at books that I had read even a year ago and realize I can't remember anything from that book. You know, I remember at the time the feeling of it being valuable, the feeling of having gotten smarter. But I don't think I actually did get smarter. I think it was kind of an illusion. It was kind of a form of intellectual entertainment. And I just decided, you know, what do I really care about? Impressive stats or actually engaging at the deepest levels of these ideas? And it was definitely the latter. And so what I decided really just a year or two ago was, what if I read a fraction of the amount of books? What if I, instead of 30 books a year, I read five or 10. But I completely immerse myself. So this is what I do, is I step into the role of the author, almost. So I write a summary, but the summary is not just straight quotes. It's not like an exact scientific summary. I actually add my own interpretations. I add my own metaphors that I think sometimes are even better for certain people than the metaphors in the book. So I'm injecting my own creativity into it. It's almost like I'm setting myself up as a pseudo authority. Not on the original subject matter, on the original research, but on the book. Become the expert on the book. And this has so many benefits. Yes, it allows me to understand things much more deeply. When you have to advocate and defend for something and people push back and they say, I don't agree with that, or I don't understand that, or that doesn't make any sense. You have to internalize and think about it so much deeper. But then there's other side benefits. You form a relationship with that author. Right. You're doing them a huge favor in summarizing their ideas. You're benefiting your audience because now you have a common framework and a common understanding and language. There's dozens of side benefits, but I think it's an example of instead of just sitting there reading and having these just moments of, aha. Oh, like these little you know, brain spasms. I want to create something that is inherently valuable, which is a book summary.

Yeah. And you can see the themes resonating throughout the entire conversation because those creations don't just stand on their own. They are the intermediate packets. They are the starting with abundance. They are the idea recycling that then you use in the future. And so we're not talking about 10 distinct principles here. We're talking about an entire ecosystem of ideas where the sum is greater than all the individual parts.

Yes, absolutely.