The Best Tool To Filter Noise

Posted by Greg Bond

August 8, 2008

For me, there are many things that can make a good day, a good day. For some people, it can be simple things like driving and seeing a really cute puppy on the way home from work. For me, when I get a new idea, or something changes the way I think about something, I feel like it has been a good day. One of my favorite ways I get this feeling is from reading RSS feeds. But there is a deep dark secret about RSS feeds that bloggers do not share.

Even though taking in knowledge makes you smarter on some level, it isn’t actually productive. Reading RSS feeds will not help you with a thing, if all you are looking for is a new idea. Every person you know can offer a new idea. So if you are getting new ideas from RSS feeds, and that is your single goal, you are missing out on the relationship building that is actually supposed to occur during an idea exchange.

RSS reading alone, is actually anti-productive and will keep you from achieving the same status of the authors who content you waste so much time sucking in. It really doesn’t take much brains to make a ton of money or get a lot of attention. There are a ton of dumb ass execs, artist types, and publicity hunters everywhere making bank, with half-a-brain. Most every blogger you read isn’t smarter than you, they just produced more. Reading RSS feeds has the guise of productivity, but it is actually the opposite. Instead you are spending more and more time, doing nothing of any value to anyone else.

With that said, recently, I’ve changed my reading habits. I only read RSS feeds to find things worth sharing. It’s actually made my reading more enjoyable, because now I can filter out a ton of crap, and read from a well defined perspective. The most effective way to filter out noise is to know why you are reading in the first place. My new goal is to be a knowledge translator and relayer, and leave it to the computers to suck in information.

Lesson: Reading alone isn’t conducive to learning and productivity.