How much information are you consuming “just-in-case”? Amassing knowledge that you aren’t going to take action on now because “it could come in handy later”?
This is not to detract from the potential serendipitous magic that can occur from crossing streams of knowledge from seemingly unrelated disciplines.
The distinction in my mind is between consuming content with underlying principles and patterns that can bleed into other areas of your life, vs content that is very focused on a specific task but doesn’t have much carry over value.
The ‘principles of good investing’, for instance, I have found to have great general applicability. Whereas ‘how to properly use a cycling power-meter’ is only useful if, well… you’re currently using a cycling power meter. Chances are in the latter case, if you were to need that information later, you would have to re-consume the content anyway. ‘just-in-time’.
Put simply are you reading for wisdom or information?
Full credit to Tim Ferris’s for originally sharing this concept on his podcast. I’ve found having this heuristic when considering what content I should consume very valuable and wanted to share some of my additional framing around principles and wisdom.