The best way to consume anything longer than a Tweet
I was someone who was never a avid reader all my life. Just a different kind of environment I was brought up in. So whenever I thought of picking up that book, owning my learning and developing a consistent habit to read, it all seemed like a daunting task. But then Internet created the environment that changed me. It all started with Twitter.
Reading tweets was simple. Short 140-character tweets as it was that simple back then. I would generally find casual updates and pithy quotes but they were often interleaved with deeper insightful tweets on my feed. I would soon slip into gorgeous tweetstorms as my curiosity was being slowly uncovered, realized and shot into essays and books.
On the Internet, my curiosity was not guided by any kind of institutions but people publishing their mind. Publishing on the internet means there are no publishers to convince. No editors trying to save their ass. Which is great for humanity. But, ofcourse! I soon ran into the classic problem of the Internet.
You have an endless stream of content. And there’s no gatekeeper. You’re all on your own. You're constantly maneuvering around click-bait headlines and areblind-sided by algorithmic filtering. They are all incentivized to make you addictively consume many, not to ponder upon the few. They are all designed to feed, not to nurture.
But ever so often, you come across someone with a quality judgement and sincerity to nurture the minds of their followers. It starts with finding one and then you're lead to all at once. Hold onto them as I now describe the best way to consume anything longer than a Tweet.
The Mindset
If you only promise yourself that you'll be consuming intention, you'll soon find Internet as a great technology to discover your curiosity. With the assumption that you don't much about what I am interested in (which was the case when I was 15), let's say the purpose of the Internet is to make you engage with your curiosities as deeply as they are. You might be interested in reading tweets about a 100 things, a blog about 15 of them and a book about a few. With this mindset, let's being.
The good news for me was:
Some of the really smart bloggers digestify and simplify knowledge from books and observations into blogs.
Step 1 : Discovering Blogs
I discover blogs from multiple sources, but my preferred platform to follow a blogger is Twitter. The 140-280 character tweets serves as a small pitch to what the blog is about. Also, on Twitter you can very easily ditch the algorithmic feed for a chronological feed, by unchecking “Make best tweets appear first” in settings. The onus of managing my feed is on me, I prefer that for it really makes me more self-aware of my own judgement and what is most relevant to my curiosity.
I found this tweet from Naval to be game-changing for how I approach Twitter:
"Block the Outraged, Mute the Nitpickers, Like the Kind, and Follow the Insightful."
Step 2 : DON’T READ WHEN YOU DISCOVER : Download a Read-Later App
No impulse purchases should be followed for anything that you pay with time, money or attention. Reading a tweets has a high and you will check out a lot of blogs, which on a second-thought you won't be interested in at all.
Also, reading tweets demands very different attention than reading blogs. I wanna allow my brain to focus on one thing at a time. So I only want to consume the tweets on my feed without being directed to any other kind of task like reading blogs.
As I discover blogs through various mediums like Twitter, I don’t wanna read it at the moment I discover. I consciously refrain from it.
The activity of discovery is separate from the activity of reading blogs.
Step 3 : INTENTIONAL CONSUMPTION : when you want to consume, what you want to consume on-demand
So download a read-later app like Pocket or Instapaper, save all the articles you would wanna read to that app and read with more intention and mindfulness.
My preferred choice is Instapaper as it allows me to save links to folders, instead of an endless pile and allows me take notes as I read them. Simply way more engaging than reading in a browser with the laziness of a tweet.
To continue focusing on one thing at a time, I tend to consume related blogs as a group. Imagine if you were reading newspaper, and all articles instead of being categorized were just jumbled up. That would be pretty disorienting. This is why I like Instapaper.
Step 4 : The gift that keeps on giving
Build your own digital library
– My Instapaper builds up a dataset nothing else quite does : a complete history of all the blogs I have read. It can be my personal digital library.
– Highlight key points and take notes to deeply engage with an article, which has a feedback loop of making you ever more aware of your curiosity.
Read “comfortably”
– The app automatically downloads all articles for offline use. You will enjoy the Article View which extracts only the actual reading content from the web page, removing everything else, the obnoxious ads, the social media buttons, presenting the article in a simple readable format. You can even have these articles sent to your Kindle, if that’s something you’re into.
Achieving the Reading Habit