Even though I’m on a social media hiatus, I still check the price of Bitcoin and some stock prices through Google search. I can’t help myself.

This prompts some articles that appear to be “newsworthy”. 

But looking closer, they are just headlines like:

These are not news. Zoom out a few months, and nothing. You’d never remember it! 

Just infotainment.

Something I’ve been thinking about: intentional learning. What do I want to learn about? What do I want to consume?

Instead of being fed things by an algorithm, it’s very powerful to say “I want to learn something” and go out and learn it in a deliberate manner.

I’m afraid that most people don’t really do this anymore.

This is why I blocked cookies on youtube.com. YouTube is a wonderful resource, but its recommendation algorithm is toxic.

It only recommends you stuff to watch that are in your “comfort zone”. You watch the same stuff over and over.

Last year I followed the Astros’ cheating scandal a lot. Partly because the YouTube algorithm would continuously recommend me videos on that topic. I was addicted to the content for weeks, if not months.

And most of that content was just forgettable “news”, like the Bitcoin news I mentioned above. Just some small new detail that emerged that could be spun into a news story.

I wasted so much time on those videos.

I think it’s better to “go looking” deliberately for things. I think that might be the key to success. Because, really, that’s just being curious, and curiosity is the best predictor for success.

A business idea won’t come to you. You must go looking.

Good friends and attractive members of the opposite sex won’t magically come to you. You must go looking.

Happiness won’t come to you. You must go searching.

We are not proactive enough anymore. We all scroll mindlessly through our feeds and hope that breakthroughs will appear. But they never do. 

When, really, the most interesting and fun parts of life come when you break out of the cycle and do something new and original.