Information Consumption:

Cal Newport:

"Now, let's think of your mind as the digestive system for reality itself. If you eat too much information, then you get anxious. And if you don't eat enough information with your mind, then you get bored. So to maximize the enjoyment in our lives, we want to maximize the time that we spend at our edge. We're not bored, we're not anxious. We're in the middle. We're between the two. Everything becomes meaningful. We're using what we're learning by building. You win the game of life by finding enjoyment, not pleasure. Big difference in as much. All right. So that's a cool idea that Dan had there. I'm going to summarize it here for you. ... information consumption matters for how you feel and how you do in life. Like that it's not a harmless thing or a thing that's off to the side of your mood or your ability to execute. It's actually a core thing that determines what your day is actually like. Now, he has this really clear idea about quantity of information. If you're not consuming enough information, you're bored, and that's not good. But if you're consuming too much information, you know, you're just internet fire hosing all day long. You get overloaded and then you're not able to focus any attention that's left on on things that are important to you, like self-improvement. So, you got to find that edge, as he calls it, between too little information and too much information. Now, I think that that quantity idea is very important. And I think the more general idea that that underscores is even more important still. So again, the more general idea here is care about your information consumption ... you should care about that as much as you care about like what you consume for food. We're very familiar with that. Like this notion of like what you eat matters. If you eat too much stuff like you're going to gain weight in an unhealthy way, but if you don't eat enough, you're going to lose weight and be unhealthy in different ways. you got to find the right amount of food and then maybe you find certain types of food or you know you react better then to other types of food. That's the bigger point I'm taking away ... like well we got to think about there's so much information out there such quantities and such variety we have to start caring about our information consumption if we want to sort of reset our lives get out of a feeling of being stuck and actually make progress going forward. So I want to transform this into a piece of concrete advice. So, here's what I want you to consider doing. Creating an information consumption log ..."