Wilt Chamberlain was one of the best basketball players in history, yet he actively chose not to be better. Why? As Malcom Gladwell described in an excellent podcast, Chamberlain chose to limit himself to shooting free-throws via the less efficient overhand method as switching to underhand free-throws would change his habits and how others viewed him.
Similarly all of us choose to not improve even though we don’t often realize it. Due to the internet’s spread of information, we now have the ability to learn about any topic that interests us, but to do so we must change our habits and how we structure our days.
Every day we make decisions about the content we consume without thinking of it. For an average American this looks like
- Shows – In Q2 2020, the American households spent 142 min a week streaming videos
- Social Media – In 2019 and 2020, average daily social media usage of internet users worldwide was 145 minutes a day
- Newspapers – In 2020, The New York Times had 6.9 million subscribers and the Wall Street Journal had 3.1 million subscribers
Spending our time in these ways feels automatic, but it’s not. Each item above is a default habit we’ve picked up based on filters we chose. If you like these filters and they’re helping you learn, great! If not, the amazing thing is we can craft our defaults to better reflect how we want to live our lives and what we want to learn.
My simple two step process for learning is:
- Spend time up front creating the filters you want
- This will differ by person and domain as a budding architect learning her trade probably doesn’t need the same info as a software developer
- For myself, I don’t read any daily newspapers and instead focus on a group of email newsletters with in depth content
- Once you’ve created filters, focus on incremental growth
- Once your filters are built, there won’t be immediate improvement and that’s ok
- As Einstein said and Peter Kaufman described in his amazing speech “the most powerful force in the world is compound investing”
- When Alex Honnold climbed El Capitan in Yosemite, it looked like an impressive one day feat, but he’d building up for years to get there
There’s a saying in tech called “garbage in garbage out”. It means if you have bad data, then nothing else matters and your output will be subpar. While this is true, so is its inverse.
If we spend time every day on high quality content matching our interests, then it’s inevitable that we will learn and grow as well.