We’re at an amazing point in history, and one that will be changing (for the worse?) as AI continues to develop. Between tools like YouTube (free), summaries of books (many free) and the books themselves (not free, but more easily available than any time in history), you can learn whatever you want whenever you want.
In a recent episode of the Founders podcast, David was talking about the book “Working Backwards” about the history of Amazon. From the show:
You’ll be shocked. If you go through this book, you’ll be shocked at how many ideas Jeff (Bezos) got from reading a paper, reading a book, having a conversation that he used inside of Amazon. If you’re paying attention, the whole world is a classroom.
The alternative, as Seth Godin recently shared, is to be “willfully uninformed“:
Today, if there’s something I don’t know, it’s almost certainly because I haven’t cared enough to find out.
I don’t understand molecular biology, the history of Sardinia or much of agronomy–but that’s my choice. Now that information is widely and freely available, our sense of agency around knowledge needs to change.
As Seth says, it’s clearly your choice. You don’t have to read and you don’t have to find educational videos to deepen your knowledge. You can make the decision to stay willfully uninformed, but you also get to deal with the consequences of that, whatever they may be in your current stage of life.
