One of my primary frustrations with reading and writing for a living is that I am unable to read everything I want to read.
Granted, “everything I want to read” is pretty close to everything that exists and last time I checked I was constrained by time as much as the next guy, but still.
I’ve written before that one of the best attributes a writer (or anyone in the entertainment industry) can obtain is the ability to sort.
Sort through the longform stories you want to read, podcasts you want to listen to, and blogs you want to browse. If you aren’t good at it you can potentially spend more time sorting than you do consuming which is a bad spot to be in — your ledger isn’t looking too hot at that point.
I realized today as I signed up for yet another TinyLetter that at some point I’m going to have to stop sorting (maybe I’m already there) and just trust the aggregators of things I choose to put interesting content in front of me.
At some point it becomes about picking good aggregators of material on the front end so that the back end is fruitful.
One of my friends is going to Mexico next week and he said to me the other day “I want books from you. Give them to me.” I am his aggregator of interesting material — he doesn’t search for stuff because he trusts me to provide it for him.
I need about 10 of those folks I trust innately to do that for me. And in exchange I think I can do it for about 1,000 others.
That’s some math I can get behind.