- Quick Summary
- Fact #1: The Internet Brought Us A Huge Leverage Increase
- Fact #2: Some Knowledge Is Worth A Lot More Than Other Knowledge
- What Makes A Powerful Idea
- View Full Mastery Manual
- Watch Classes
- Masterclass
- Coaching Call #1
- Coaching Call #2
- Other Resources
- Slides
- Navigate Learning How To Learn Mental Models
Quick Summary
The idea behind knowledge mining is that we can learn to do research that brings us more growth and more profit.
Two facts, in particular, make this possible, today more than ever.
Fact #1: The Internet Brought Us A Huge Leverage Increase
We live in a unique time because the internet has provided us with a dramatic increase in our ability to find and use knowledge.
Knowledge, in one sense, is a crystallized experience. It's abstracted trial and error, it's the experience of the species, all data compressed into sets of ideas, models, and symbols that we can now send back and forth to each other through the internet. We got a 100x, maybe even 1,000x increase in speed and efficiency compared to the time, not too long ago, where in order to get a piece of knowledge you had to get a book, read a journal, or talk to a person, which could then lead you to another book, journal, expert.
It was a very slow process to find the breadcrumb trails that would allow us to follow a chain of knowledge and do real research because we couldn’t follow rabbit holes very rapidly.
And now, with knowledge basically hyperlinked, with tools like Wikipedia, Google, with all the online journals offering free articles and academic papers, we can say that this is a platinum age of knowledge and information. When you want to study a new topic, when you’re interested in something, you can go online and do a little research and very quickly can get a sense of:
- Who the top thinkers in the field are
- Their different models
- Their different value systems
- Their different perspectives
- Who's talking a language that you can understand
- Who they think the smart people are
You can watch videos, look at graphics, read articles. In an hour, you can get your bearings about something. You can understand the fundamental distinctions, get a sense of who the thinkers are and what their philosophical differences, their similarities, their convergences or agreements are, and then you can decide if you want to go deeper.
That’s the opportunity we didn’t have only a couple of short years ago.
Fact #2: Some Knowledge Is Worth A Lot More Than Other Knowledge
We can develop an esthetic sense of high-quality knowledge, but the way to it is by doing a lot of mining through knowledge and looking at a lot of different knowledge across multiple domains to find the ideas that are really the powerful ones.
What Makes A Powerful Idea
A valuable piece of knowledge is something that helps you understand something better so that you can do, be, feel, or have something you haven’t before:
- Get a particular result,
- Have more power,
- Build your business,
- Get clients, etc.
It has a means-ends sort of value to it. As we experiment with knowledge, get knowledge, use knowledge, the more we get a sense of which knowledge could be valuable. (We also get a sense that we need to try the knowledge out to get to know whether it’s valuable.)
When you have a good mental model that gives you a way of doing the research efficiently, one focused hour of effort can yield gems. It's like going down to a random stream with a pan, spending an hour there, and coming out with a pound of gold. That's what's available right now.
View Full Mastery Manual
Watch Classes
Masterclass
Coaching Call #1
Coaching Call #2
Other Resources
Slides
Navigate Learning How To Learn Mental Models
Connecting your brain with other people’s in the right way is multiplicative, not additive. Using network science research, learn how to filter who to build deep relationships with and how to rapidly build deep relationships built on mutual growth.
/w=32,quality=90,fit=scale-down){kind=small}
Research shows that when we teach what we learn, we learn faster. This is known as the Explanation Effect and it even applies when we teach concepts to ourselves by journaling, mind mapping, or talking out loud.
When you have a good mental model that gives you a way of doing the research efficiently, one focused hour of effort can yield gems. The Knowledge Mining model shows how to do research that brings us more growth and more profit.
/w=32,quality=90,fit=scale-down){kind=small}
When it comes to being a world-class entrepreneur or scientist, being a polymath might actually be the rule rather than the exception. Learn how to enjoy the benefits of being a polymath while avoiding the disadvantages.
A digital garden is a public repository where you share your sawdust. In this manual, we’ll take a deeper look into digital gardens and do a step-by-step walkthrough of one of the apps that make them possible.
/w=32,quality=90,fit=scale-down){kind=small}
What should you learn next? One of the reasons this question is so difficult to answer is because the choices are literally endless. The Multiplier Skills Mental Model gives you a formula for choosing what learning hurdle to conquer next.
The Subtraction Learning Method is the mental model Success By Subtraction applied to learning. It’s one of the most useful mental models but, as it often happens, it can be challenging to apply it. That’s why we did a series of 3 classes to help you practice this method and we organized a 7-day learning challenge that you can now do on your own.
The most important skill anybody can learn is the ability to learn rare and useful skills on-demand. Across warfare, AI, learning sciences, business, philosophy and animal intelligence, there is almost the same exact loop. I call this the Learning Loop mental model, and it is the fundamental learning process of the universe.
/w=32,quality=90,fit=scale-down){kind=small}
Selling Your Sawdust is the process of turning the by-products of your learning process that you’d normally throw away (which, in my experience, is over 90% of notes) into products that can be valuable to other people.
/w=32,quality=90,fit=scale-down){kind=small}
The ultimate sign of mastery is being world-class in what you do automatically. This model will help you understand how to go from conscious competence to unconscious competence to leverage the power of intuition.
/w=32,quality=90,fit=scale-down){kind=small}
We live in an age of opportunity shock—too many opportunities, too little time. This model helps you decide what to do when there’s a new opportunity that could potentially be huge but you’re busy and you don’t want to waste time pursuing a flop.
/w=32,quality=90,fit=scale-down){kind=small}
When it comes to mastering a skill, it’s more practical to think 100 hours, not 10,000. By picking the right micro-skills and stacking them, you can reach mastery 100x faster and continue building success upon success.
/w=32,quality=90,fit=scale-down){kind=small}
We’re discussing reinventing learning itself. What does it really mean to learn and to reinvent learning in our lives?