Extract more than you put in

In any given day, extract more from your brain than you put in.

A word at a time

Look, it’s pretty simple to understand why brain rot is such a big problem. Your speed of thought runs a word at a time. We used to consume books, because they read at our pace of thought. We can drop out of reading and go into deep thought, and then come back to reading again. With short-form video and snippet-style social media, this is not the case.

Arguably even thinking is done better on paper, because it forces another level of slowdown. At least for me, because I don’t write that fast.

Your attention is the currency

You can’t easily drop out of brain rot, because the platforms are designed to keep your attention. The currency is not your money, it’s your attention. They sell your attention to advertisers. That’s how they get paid.

Really stop and think about that business model for a second. THEY SELL YOUR ATTENTION TO ADVERTISERS.

There’s a bitter undertone of revenue-driven, systematic manipulation of our attention. The shift from long-form to short-form video, and from blogs to short posts, is living proof.

Your brain rots further

So, they keep your attention and your brain rots further. Even I fall victim to it from time to time.

Every time I’m on YouTube or Instagram I feel less good about it. It’s not even a guilty pleasure anymore. It’s just not fulfilling at all.

There’s a principle though

It can help you manage this pressing, agonising feeling of wanting to consume. In any given day, you should extract more from your brain (produce) than you put into it (consume passively).

For example: you watch one 10-minute video, and now you need to write about that video for 20 minutes. Hypothetically.

It’s about intention and energy

It’s not really about matching and timekeeping. Sometimes a moment of thought can be so deep and profound that it satisfies you deeply and offsets the desire to consume more. It kicks you into the creation gear, and that keeps spinning for a while.

That’s the whole point of this principle. It forces you to get closer to your flow state in the opposite direction: a flow state of producing instead of consuming.

By hand

I use notebooks for different projects and processes, and I write by hand. It helps me to think deeply. And it’s very enjoyable.

There’s no apple tree or snake around every corner trying to seduce me into the sins of social media. I’m with my own thoughts, I’m on my own terms. I can stop, I can pause, I can continue, at will and at any moment.

Consumption with intent

Even my agentic setup caters to this. Instead of me scrolling X, it scrolls for me and extracts insights related to what I’m working on and what my latest notes look like. When I want to know something, instead of going to YouTube I deploy a research team that writes up a long report, properly indexed and linked, so I can go straight to the sections I want.

I call this consumption with intent, because it helps me:

• consume meaningful things
• consume relevant things
• learn while consuming, because I can interact with the content
• compound knowledge
• connect my thoughts and notes to my work

Feels like play

I wonder if I can stop consuming the old, brain-rot way entirely, if I automate all of this to be optimal intellectually and, at the same time, relatively entertaining. It doesn’t feel like work, it feels like play, keeping me on the edge of my capabilities.

I think I can, and that’s what I intend to achieve with the agentic setups I’m working on. Let’s see how far I can get.

So, extract more value from your brain than you put into it. You’ll be surprised what you can get out.