Accelerate Your Career #2: Learning How to Learn (Classic)

What's up everyone, this is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder's Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product.

This week on Founder's Journal, we're doing things a little differently. We're dropping our first mini series all about how to accelerate your career. And instead of just one episode Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, this week, we're giving you two: a new show that you won't want to miss, plus a classic episode you maybe haven't heard before. Put it all together and you're getting a mini curriculum on taking your career to the next level. This episode was originally released earlier this year, but in case you hadn't heard it yet, or even if you have, give it a listen and get ready to level up your job skills. We can't wait to find out what you think.

So, this past weekend I was reflecting on my journey in media, and one thing I thought about was how I went from being a total novice to an expert in the space in just a few years. It made me think deeper about learning broadly and what the process is that I went through to learn about media, but also what I go through to learn about anything new. In a world of information abundance and limited time, it is more important than ever to understand how to go about learning in an efficient and effective way. In this episode, I'm going to map out my process for going down the proverbial rabbit hole, a process you can use for learning anything new. Let's hop into it.

I think about the process of learning like test taking in college. There are two types of students: the memorizer and the understander. The memorizer is the student who studies past tests and their answers. The understander is the student who studies the textbook and reflects on its principles so that no matter what test is put in front of them, their mind can adapt to the challenge. That is the foundation created by this process. High quality learning is about being an understander rather than a memorizer. Your goal is to go from knowing little about a topic and not being able to apply that topic in your life, to knowing a whole lot about a topic and being able to apply it to many aspects of your life.

I want to share with you a repeatable process for going from know little, apply little, to know a lot, apply a lot with any topic you want to learn more about personally or professionally from our healthcare system, to blockchain technology, to the future of education. There are four steps to mastering any new topic. First is curation. Second is consumption. Third is reflection. Fourth is creation. Let's go through each one.

How to Learn, Step 1: Curation

Step one is about curation. Curation is about getting to the highest signal content as fast as possible. Curation is what I think of as a narrowing process. Think about your content consumption as a funnel, where you can only allow so much information into that funnel without getting overwhelmed. Curation is the first step in you going from having all of the information on the internet to possibly consume, to somewhat focusing where you start consuming. Now, the reason that curation is so important, especially today is because as I've said in past Founder's Journal episodes, the internet has allowed for free creation of content. And because of that, there is significantly more content on the internet today than there was yesterday, and there will be significantly more tomorrow than there is today.

So having an initial narrowing function is so incredibly important. How do I go about narrowing? Well, at the end of the day, the single mental model is: look to people that I trust. So on social media, I make sure to curate very specific Twitter lists, where I follow, very intentionally, people that I want to see, what are the inputs, what is the information that they're putting into their body? Let's say you don't know anyone to start. Like you don't know the list to curate, you don't have the people you trust in a digital environment.

What I would do is look up the fastest growing companies in a specific space that you're interested in. So, if you're interested in the future of education, look up, what are the fastest companies in the ed tech or education space? Look up the founders, follow the founders on social media platforms that they frequent most, and see what resources the founders are referencing in everything from their company blog to their own personal social handles. And then from there, I would also look at what are the podcasts, websites, YouTube channels, books, what are all of the references, or the inputs, they're putting into their body that is leading to the output that is their business and the decisions they're making for their specific business.

So to bring it all together, curation is getting more important as we live in a world of information, abundance and curation is the first step in narrowing from all information that you could consume on the internet to some content that you could consume that you have gotten from people that you trust.

How to Learn, Step 2: Consumption

If step one is curation. Step two is consumption. Now I have found that there are two different types of consumers. There are a passive consumers, and there are active consumers. The key to being a good consumer is to do so actively and iteratively. So here are some rules for being an active consumer.

Active Consumer Strategy #1: Don’t Consume for the Sake of Consuming

The first is not consuming for the sake of consuming. What does that mean in practice? If you have a book, don't feel like you need to the end of the book, just because you've said you wanna read a book. Same thing goes for a podcast, an article, anything else. I used to be the reader who would open up a book and, I'll use an example, a book called Ender's Game. Ender's Game is a sci-fi thriller that a lot of people have talked up again. It was curated by people that I trusted and I started reading it. For whatever reason Ender's game did not click with me, but I felt the need to finish it because this idea of finality was so important to me.

But then I listened, to actually a podcast, by Tim Ferriss, where he talked to a man named George Raveling, and George Raveling is a polymath. He has read thousands of books, and the interesting thing about him is, he never finishes a book because his view is that the highest value takes place in a few chapters, so why would you read an entire book once you feel like you've gotten the value. Once you've gotten the value, why don't you move on to in the next book? Another thing that George Raveling does is he goes to the index of the book where all of the different topics are listed, and he'll find an interesting topic that's mentioned in the index, and that is where it will start reading the book to try and focus his attention as quickly as possible on what's important, rather than just starting the book in the beginning, because that is what was called the beginning by the author. So the first thing is not consuming for the sake of finality. Once you get value, move on. If you don't get value, move on before it's too late.

Active Consumer Strategy #2: Take Notes

The second way to be an active consumer is to take notes for future recall and write things down for retention. I have found that note taking is the best force function to make you an active reader, and also to document the ideas that you'll use to form your own ideas later on. If you read without taking notes, it's like learning to swim by watching someone swim, but then never trying to swim yourself and seeing how the strokes work for you.

If you want to go deeper into this concept of note-taking, you should check out one or two people, David Perell, who you can find on Twitter, he also has a blog, or Tiago Forte, who has a Twitter. He also created a course called building a second brain. They have so many thoughts on the topic of note-taking and how being a great note taker and effectively building a second brain outside of your body through notes can be a massive unlock in your life. I'll throw in the show notes, links to their stuff, so you can start checking them out, and maybe I'll actually do a future episode about smart note taking.

Active Consumer Strategy #3: Go Deep

The third and final thing you can do to be an active consumer is to start focusing on two to three authors of content and to go deep. So this is the iterative part of consumption, right? So, we were talking about curating. So, let's say you curated a list of 12 sources you want to consume about a topic because the people you follow recommended those sources. That doesn't mean you need to read all 12 sources you initially wrote down. Actually, you probably shouldn't read all 12 because that means you're not making changes to your process once you've started reading. What you should do is let your curiosity guide you, as well as the content that most resonates with you.

So, say that you find an author that you think does an incredible job laying out the foundation of a topic that you're going down the rabbit hole of. Screw the 11 other sources. Set those aside for the time being, and read everything that author has written. I experience this all the time. So for example, as I push myself to learn more about the world of media, entertainment, and gaming, I came across an online writer named Matthew Ball, and I found him to be the smartest thinker about the world of entertainment and gaming. Once I read his first piece, I ended up reading a second, third, fourth, and fifth piece before a reading any of the other 11 pieces that I had originally curated in my first list. So that is the second step, being an active consumer.

How to Learn, Step 3: Reflection

Once you have curated your best resources, once you've been an active consumer, who's taken notes, read the things by trusted sources, and made consumption into an iterative process, the third step of learning how to learn is reflection. And I find that reflection is the most important of the four steps in the learning process. I find that it is the bridge between consuming and applying. If you want to form new ideas and your own points of view, if you want to be a thought leader and not just a thought follower, you have to give yourself the time and space to reflect.

So many people fuck this step up. I think in a world where there's so much stimulus, where we have technology in front of us, it is so easy for us to just scroll through social. It is so easy for us to just move on to the next thing that competes for our attention, but sometimes the best thing you can do is say no to all of the things that are competing for your attention and sit with your own thoughts. So there is a few ways that you can do this.

Reflecting Strategy #1: Solo Reflection

The first way is solo reflection, where after reading something, you go through a process of posing questions to yourself and sharing your own thoughts to the question you post yourself, almost kind of like this self-talk exercise. So, to use the example I said before, Matthew Ball is this amazing writer on media and entertainment. One concept he talks a lot about is the metaverse and the metaverse is effectively this always-on virtual world. Imagine, like, almost like if you were living in virtual reality at all times. It's a wild concept that is becoming more and more popular, actually, Mark Zuckerberg recently talked about Facebook becoming a metaverse company, but using the example of solo reflection, after reading the Matthew Ball piece, before reading another one of his pieces, a really good exercise for me would be to ask myself, do I believe that the metaverse is going to become mainstream? If so, why? If not, why not? And then answering that question for myself. It forces me to think critically about what I'm reading versus just saying, Matthew Ball is a thought leader, I need to trust everything he says.

Reflecting Strategy #1: Peer Reflection

Another way to do reflection if you don't want to do it by yourself is peer reflection, where you end up having a conversation with anyone that's willing to listen. It is always a benefit if you can talk to someone that knows a lot about the subject, or is the author of one of the pieces, so if I actually spoke to Matthew Ball about one of his pieces that I read, it can be both a great reflection exercise and an active learning experience, where I can go directly to the source, but many times things that I've read, I've gone to my girlfriend or to my sister, to a friend who has no vested interest in the topic, but just by them listening, it is a force function for me taking the time to think through what I just consumed.

Shane Parrish, who is a great thinker, he's a great social media creator, he describes this concept of reflection in a really powerful way. What he says is, "Reflection is an example of an approach I call first order negative, second order positive." It's got very visible short-term costs, it takes time and honest self-assessment about our shortcomings, but it pays off in spades in the future. The problem is that the future is not visible today. So slowing down today to go faster at some future point, seems like a bad idea to many. Plus with the payoff being so far in the future, it's hard to connect to the reflection today. This is why so many people are bad at reflection, is because it doesn't benefit you in the moment, it benefits you at some point later on. And that's why I think it's so important for me to talk about it, is to reiterate it for you that reflecting after curating and consuming is the best service you can do for yourself.

How to Learn, Step 4: Creating

The fourth and final step of the learning process is what I call creating. Once you've curated high signal content, once you've taken that high signal content and you've actively and iteratively consumed it, and then you've gone through the most important step of reflecting on what you've consumed, you now have this solid foundation to be able to create your own ideas and points of view about the topic that you've become fluent in.

Creation Strategy #1: Remixing

Creation takes many forms, but I think the most beginner version is something that I call remixing. That is where you connect existing ideas and combine them in a manner that they make something new. When you hear people saying Uber for X, Amazon for Y, Peloton for Z, that's an example of remixing. You are taking an existing concept that's proven, like any of these massive tech companies and combining it with your new knowledge that you've accumulated, and by doing so, you create a new idea.

By the way, remixing isn't a bad thing, but it's the simplest form of creation. Just think about for Morning Brew. Morning Brew didn't invent business content and Morning Brew. Didn't invent newsletters Morning Brew just took The Wall Street Journal and old school business media and adapted it in a format that we thought worked for our audience. We were The Wall Street Journal for millennials.

Creation Strategy #2: Original Creation

Then beyond remixing, I'd say the more elevated version of it is original creation, which is more about totally new ideas and markets that have never been invented before. An example I like to think of is Airbnb. If Airbnb's founders said, we want to create Marriott for millennials, that would have been a remixed idea that would have probably had limited opportunity. You could even envision it being kind of a hotel that is smaller in nature, the space, the living space is smaller, but there's more experiences around it. But instead Joe Gebbia, Brian Chesky, they instead ideated something truly original, a totally new market where staying with strangers in their homes could be an entirely new category of housing.

TL;DR

And that's the four-step process for learning anything new: curation, consumption, reflection, and creation. I encourage you to reflect on this process on your own time, and let me know if you have any questions. It is so important that you understand this as it can literally accelerate your ability to learn for the rest of your career and life.

I Want to Hear From You All

Separately. I want to hear from you all. This community has been absolutely incredible recently from engaging on social, to sending me questions and thoughts, to sharing the podcast with others. And as this thing gets bigger, I want to make sure I'm talking about the aspects of building businesses, and honestly, building your life that are most valuable to you. So send an email to alex@morningbrew.com with any episode ideas that you want me to talk about, or any other thoughts that you have for the show. I would love to hear from you. As always, thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.