Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 13
I found a huge lifehack for how I consume video and audio content. It's very simple and obvious but a game-changer.
From now on I start consuming all video and audio content 10% in. And 20% in for any topic related to news or politics.
That's it. That's the whole hack.
The way it works is, if I open a new YT video, podcast, or audio book, I jump 10-20% forward and starting my watching/listening from there.
Over the years this will save you 100s of hours of wasted time. Most YT videos and podcasts have no meaningful content within the first 10%. It's a bunch of boilerplate, intro, recap, garbage, devoid of substance. The way your mind works, you don't need to consume content in linear order. You can start watching a video or reading a book from 50% and your mind will still make sense of it. And if that 50% is good enough you can go back and listen to it from the start. But most content is not deep enough to warrant such meticulous attention. Except mine of course. You gotta watch my videos from 0%. :P
This simple little lifehack has revolutionized how I consume content. I am no longer a slave to the linear format nor do I respect the sequence of events that authors lays out. I jump around and scavenge from content exactly what I need. Stop trying to be a completionist about content (books, videos, podcasts, etc). Most content is not good enough to warrant it and actually abuses your time and focus. Take back the authority of your own mind. Learn material how you need, not how someone laid it out. They don't know you. They don't know what you know and what you need.
Throw away this notion that you need to sit down and consume a piece of content from start to finish. From now on, content has to earn that right.
If you skip the first 20% of political videos, especially, you will jump straight to the good bits. Over time you will develop a feel for which content should be started where. It's an intuition you will build.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a crocodile ;)
When I first invented my crocodile metaphor, I saw crocodiles every day for like a month. It was like the universe communicating to me in crocodiles. I might be walking through a mall and see a Lacoste store. Once you see it you can't unsee it. Crocodile Awakening.
I was studying synesthesia when I came across the following curious story:
A man who is able to taste colors sees a unique color for each type of food. So he invents recipes to maximize the taste of his colors. He will cook up a roasted chicken breast with strawberries and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Why this combination? Because each item in the recipe corresponds to the same color, say, dark blue, and he eats to maximize the taste of a specific shade. Imagine that when you eat chicken you experience dark blue. And if you stack that chicken with strawberries and vanilla ice cream you get the purest, strongest dark blue.
So this man is on a culinary quest to taste the most beautiful and delicious colors. Whereas the typical human distinguishes between about 5 shades of a color — sky blue, navy, sapphire, indigo, cobalt, etc — a typical synesthete will distinguish up to 30. So he can make 30 recipes to maximize the taste of 30 different blues.
Attending a dinner, one synesthete remarked that the chicken was not pointy enough for his liking, because he tastes geometric shapes and he likes the pointy ones.
There are over 30 different types of synesthesia, some as common as 4% of the population, some as rare as one in a million.
This gives you a little taste of the power of Consciousness.
I love watching bushcraft & outdoor survival videos.
Here are some of my faves:
I will share many more in the future.
If you find good bushcraft videos, share them on the Actualized Forum Bushcraft Mega-Thread.