Most of what reaches you arrives as fragments. A thread with five rules in it. A talk you half watched. A post arguing the opposite of yesterday's post. You consume a great deal and end up with a pile of conclusions and no way of deciding between them, which is why a year of heavy reading can leave you no better at judgement than you started.
Try something slower. Choose one practitioner whose work is close to the problems you actually have, and stay with them for a year.
Not as a fan. As a student. Read or watch everything they have produced, in the order they made it, including the old material that is out of date. The out of date parts are the most useful, because you get to watch an idea form, get tested, and get revised, and that is the thing you cannot get from a summary. What you are after is not their conclusions. It is how they decide, which questions they ask first, what they check before they commit, what they are willing to leave unsolved.
Choose carefully. The one thing worth filtering on is whether they show their reasoning and whether they have ever changed their mind in public. Somebody who only publishes verdicts will teach you nothing you can reuse. Audience size is close to irrelevant.
Then use them properly. Build one thing they describe, properly, and notice where your version comes apart. Keep a short page of notes about their method rather than their opinions. And by the end of the year you should be able to say where you think they are wrong, with a reason. That is the sign it worked, because you were never trying to acquire a hero. You were trying to borrow a way of thinking until it became yours.
Two or three teachers like this across a career is plenty. It is also, I think, the most efficient learning available to anybody who has a full time job and a finite evening.
Tips accumulate and then expire. A method keeps working on the problems nobody has written about yet.
– Asael Shinder
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