- While I read a lot, for a long time I was beating myself up internally for not reading enough books.
Becauase the common perception is that complex books are the height of intellectual output, because the shorter the piece (essay, article, post, etc.) – the junkier it is.
But it is no true for two main reasons.First, articles generally are more actionable and better highlight opportunities.
Major books are a multi-year journey, which for some topics like AI make the point obsolete when it is ready.
(Though I have to admit that unlike 2022, the year of GenAI dawn, there was no AI article in my top in 2024, and neither was in 2023).And second, most non-fiction, “business” books provide context for a single idea.
Thus in the number of ideas explained, articles are on par with most books.
And hence the industry of book summaries.To conclude: I stopped beating myself for not reading books. In fact, reading articles is even more effective per time spent.
- When you are not junior, exploring new sources is painful and rarely gives comparable quality to new sources.
If you know basics, a summary of a book on a topic won’t work, because it will rehearse that basics.
The same is true for topics of your main interest and particularly noticeable on Youtube.
When you watch a dive-in, alrogithm gets to know you are interested in the subject.
But most recommendations are shallow, targeted to a more general audience, that doesn’t know all the nuances you know. - While the whole world seems to go to video instead of text and audio, I started liking text even more than before.
The reason is pretty simple.
I can skim through text and can’t skim through video or audio.
In foreign languages I do it slower than in the native one, but it still is better than no skimming.
The speed of text processing is still much faster than of audio, at least for me.Indeed, the need for summarization is pretty clear, and there are products out there.
But see #2 – summaries are shallow, for a deep dive they are pretty meaningless.
Thus transcripts work the best if the information part is the most important.
But if non-verbals are the key – that also happens, and for this video is evidently better than audio which is better than text.In my case, the implication was that unlike previous years, all the top content of 2024 was articles and not videos or audios.