Read.

If I have a single piece of strategy advice, it’s this.

Read. All the time.

Early on in my career I had a boss who asked how I knew about… the weird things I knew about. I said “I read a lot”, and that rapidly turned into me doing some rough math. My estimate at the time was about a thousand pages (or equivalents) a week, between books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and social media. He used to tell people this in meetings, which was both flattering and mildly embarrassing.

Imagine this scene from The Big Short without the racism, (which was most of it), and that was the vibe.

Every good idea I’ve had has come in some part from that kind of mass consumption. Warren Ellis once described where his ideas come from as different elements of things he’d seen, smashing into each other in his brain. That was maybe the first time I had read someone explaining my own mind to me. It stuck.

I fell in love with the internet because it was, in the late 90s and early 00s, basically an endless magazine. And even though AngelFire pages were supplanted by Tumblr and BoingBoing was replaced by The Verge, there was always a new smart person with something to say. Something to read. A river of thinking, of various quality and degrees, but massively complex so much signal (and noise) on a daily basis.

Social platforms made this messier. Google Reader died and RSS feeds slowed to a crawl, and suddenly blogs, this incredible buffet of writing, just withered.

Soon all I was finding to read online was paywalled websites and social media. The algorithms got smarter. But they didn’t prioritize quality. They just knew how to draw attention.

I don’t think I read any less, over the years. But in 2025, I only read about a dozen books. More of my time and attention was spent on posts (mid), on newsletters (good), on tv and videos (mixed bag), and a more than healthy dose of comic books.

Regardless of the volume of input, my output started to narrow, a bit. Something was in the way. My information diet was the equivalent of a mall food court.

In late 2025 I decided maybe I needed to refine my inputs. In a fairly small shift that felt tectonic, I decided to take the social media apps off my phone. Anything with an endless scroll is gone, except for the substack app. And the change is somewhat staggering.

I’m not spending that much less time on my phone. But I am reading a lot more actual books and news and magazines, things with editors and standards and maybe the good kind of gatekeeping. And it’s almost unsettling how long you can go, outside of books and magazines, without encountering actual complexity.

This is what I slowly realized I was missing. The internet used to be a place full of complexity, and that was why I spent so much of my time there. It’ll probably become a great place to hang out again, and there’s undeniable creativity and genius online… but that creativity is designed and selected for effortless consumption above all else. One sentence hot takes. Minimum viable meaning. And it occurs to me that there’s no such thing as a cheap shot, when all the shots are free.

There’s no complexity on an endless scroll. Only sufficient volumes of noise to make you think another minute, hour, or day will help you find signal.

There’s no “eureka” moment here. This is a personal shift and realization, and the sad and funny part is that it’s very easy, despite feeling daunting. The worst thing that can happen is… your phone feels a little boring.

If that feels overwhelming, it says as much (if not more) about you than it does about your information diet.