RC #011: Intellectual Keto
An open-ended experiment
Hello friends,
Welcome to another edition of Rational Creatives!
In last week’s issue I mentioned I was planning to go on an information diet, but I didn’t provide much details. Today, I’ll share all of it with you. You can find this week’s gems after the Intellectual Keto section (I already dropped a hint).
Let’s dive into it 😎
Intellectual Keto
The foods you eat largely determine the way your body looks, works and feels. Similarly, the information you consume shapes the way your mind makes decisions, creates ideas and forms opinions.
That’s why it’s so important to watch your information consumption habits and actively cherry-pick the content you read, watch and listen to.
Lately, I’ve been paying more attention to the way and the kind of contents I consume, and I’ve realized I have a problem. Actually, I have two of them:
I spend too much time mindlessly scrolling on Twitter.
I mostly consume the latest books, blogs and podcasts.
An accurate diagnosis would be that I'm suffering from both FOMO and excessive inputs. For a moment I was tempted to say "excessive low-quality inputs", but I'm not sure that would be fair. Overall, the content I consume isn't garbage. The problem is that a great deal of it is likely to become irrelevant over time, and that I'm overconsuming. As a result, my creative work is suffering both in terms of volume (I'm not producing as much content as I could) and quality (I'm not producing the best content that I could).
Inspired by Ayush's 10-day experiment, I've decided to tighten up and go on an intellectual keto diet.
However, there are two main differences between his approach and mine. Since I want to build healthy, sustainable consumption habits, I won't have a deadline or time frame — this will be an open-ended experiment. On the other hand, I will be more flexible with the content I consume. During his 10-day experiment, Ayush consumed only heavy philosophical content. I expect to do this for a long time, so I won't limit my consumption to ancient philosophy and the classics (although I definitely plan to spend some time on those).
The following are my starting guidelines (which I expect to change and evolve over time):
I will keep a record of the books, podcasts and essays I read.
80% of the books I read must be at least 10 years old.
80% of the podcasts I listen to must be at least 2 years old.
80% of the blog posts and essays I read must be at least 5 years old.
I won’t read books on my phone. I will only read from my Kindle and physical books.
I will unsubscribe from most newsletters and will keep just five that I actually read and enjoy.
I won’t use any social media except for Twitter.
I will limit my use of Twitter to a maximum of 45 minutes per day. (I’ll also try to use it as mindfully and purposely as I can. The idea is to connect and have conversations with interesting people, not to mindlessly scroll through my feed).
In order to optimize for interesting people and conversations, I will periodically check the accounts I follow on Twitter and will unfollow those I don’t want to interact with anymore.
I will turn off all notifications and will leave on just the ones for DMs.
Please keep in mind that this list is a permanent work-in-progress. I'll be refining these rules as well as adding new ones. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please reach out to me. I'd love to hear from you.
Finally, I expect all these adjustments to have many positive side effects, but right now I want to achieve primarily two things (and that's what I'm going to optimize for):
I want to reduce my time consuming information in order to spend more time creating
I want to increase the quality of the information I consume in order to produce better content and writing
I'm going to document my journey on Twitter, and will share my thoughts, insights and findings with y'all via my newsletters. Stay tuned!
Weekly Gems
These are some of the most interesting things I found during this week:
Seth Godin recently launched a new book called The Practice. When I first heard about the book last week I was really tempted to buy it. But I knew I were going to start the Intellectual Keto experiment soon, so I tried my best to resist the urge. Instead of buying the book, I decided I would read Seth’s most popular blog posts. And boy, I found a gold mine. I haven’t read them all yet, but so far these two are my favorites: How to tell a great story and How to be remarkable.
Writing is networking for introverts: Thanks to Ankit, I read this great essay by Byrne Hobart. Although the essay’s main subject is networking, it has some powerful advice that also applies to audience building and is very close to Kevin Kelly’s idea of the 1000 true fans: “Fame is hard, and it has other costs. But there’s a second alternative: be microfamous. Microfame is the best kind of fame, because it combines an easier task (be famous to fewer people) with a better outcome (be famous to the right people).”
This week Harry Dry from Marketing Examples teamed up with copywriting pro Annie Maguire. Together, they rewrote the copy of 9 companies’ landing pages. You can read the Twitter thread where they share and explain each case here.
The Lindy Effect “is the idea that the older something is, the longer it's likely to be around in the future”. This concept was popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Antifragile, where he confess to use this concept as a heuristic to pick the books he reads. Inspired by this idea, today my friend Deepu launched The Lindy Book List, a hand-curated Notion database with +100 timeless books. If you are thinking about joining me and give the Intellectual Keto a try, you should definitely check this out.
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