A strategy that I’ve found and developed over time around learning, and of which language model training has inspired, is to focus on high quality tokens only. An old philosophical advice usually goes around like: don’t read from the people that inspire you but rather from the people that inspired them. This formula has really done me wonders in terms of learning and figuring out stuff on my own.

The amount of knowledge and things to learn for our meat brain is infinite compared to the time capacity we have and the average lifespan of humans. For example, you could spend years studying the 1939-1945 era to learn about WWII, and you still won’t be done with grasping all the information available. What does that imply? Well one thing for sure is that it tells us that it’s a fruitless effort to just keep reading to do great things in life. Education will never end. It’s a bit frustrating at the beginning to accept, and the way I used to handle this when I was young was by reading a lot of books and eventually getting burned out.

That obviously doesn’t work and isn’t sustainable.

Therefore, how do people end up pushing the limits of what’s possible whilst learning? I think the trick is by focusing on high quality tokens, learning exclusively from the best, and sampling from the void of randomness. By doing that you develop a strong mental framework and taste that serves as a navigation system or a north star that helps you choose what to work on and how.

In other words, you want to keep learning broadly and go deep only when you think something is important and can help move the needle. And before you get to that stage, you just have to go through the long volumes of work and non optimal time allocation.

By focusing on learning from high quality token people, these people become like referees on your shoulder, and you can have chats with them in your head on their area of strength whenever you’re trying to decide to do something yourself.

Something else I’ve learned to periodically implement in my life is the DELETE button to plans, projects, books, blogs, meetings, etc. Sometimes you just don’t fully know what’s the best thing to allocate your time on, you might reach dead ends, you might incorporate a clearer view on a field, and so on. By pushing the restart button occasionally you get the upside of capitalizing on the new updated dynamics, and that’s energizing.