Turning Information into Results

David Perell recently interviewed Balaji Srinivasan on his podcast. Balaji talked about encouraging the production of writing that leads to big results in the world. Ideas that can lead to starting billion dollar businesses.

More generally, there seems to be a great need for making content translate into results. There’s endless content telling you how to improve your life or make money, but what are the results? We don’t really know. I’ve read a lot of self-improvement related articles and watched quite a few self-improvement related YouTube videos in 2020. These articles and videos make sense as you consume them, but then what? Usually nothing.

How can we do better? An obvious improvement is just to take some kind of notes on the content we consume, on what seems useful. But then what happens to the notes? Won’t they just fade away along with the source content? Probably. Maybe if you somehow tag the notes with a recurring theme and regularly review your notes for your frequently used tags. The note taking tool Roam Research has created a lot of buzz lately with its emphasis on linking notes to each other.

There’s also the idea of spaced repetition, of resurfacing things to make them stick better. So if you’re trying to learn a certain fact, a spaced repetition app will resurface that fact to you on an interval: after one day, then after two days, then after three days. This seems helpful. This is a promising technique.

Overall, it seems like early days for enabling people to get results out of the content they consume. There is tremendous potential value here, to channel the torrents of online content into real results.