I have my final exam for a finance class tomorrow. It is a class that constantly tests the strength of my belief that I can learn anything. I have been cramming revenue-crunching models into my brain all week and still draw a blank when I look at practice problems.
Generally, I read dozens of newsletters every week to find content and inspiration for this one. But this week, in the midst of all this finance studying, I haven’t made the time to do so. As a result, I have 97 unread newsletters in my inbox. And when I sat to write this newsletter, all I could see were numbers.
Polina Pompliano, the writer of one of my favorite newsletters, says that “what you eat is who you are, and what you read is who you become.” In other words, the content you consume gives your brains the inputs to output ideas. The upper bound of your creativity lies at the best of what you consume.
Pompliano likens this to a diet. Your “content diet” is the content you feed your brain. And to stay in shape, you need to maintain the diet—even when your GPA wants otherwise.
Improving your content diet is two-fold: you need to find a manageable quantity of information (i.e. not 97 newsletters!) which has the quality you aspire towards for your own ideas (i.e. not mindless formulas). Create an environment that challenges the way you think.
Then, change the world.
