How to become an infovore in 4 steps

An infovore: A person who indulges in and desires information gathering and interpretation.

I get asked a bit about how do I find stuff to read, and when do I have time to read it? Below’s my 4 steps to becoming an infovore:

1. Start by being interested in the world around you. Keep your eyes and ears open, read widely, pick up free magazines, read newspapers (old skool hard copies or the online ones), listen to podcasts etc. One of my professors used to say ‘everything is interesting if you’re interested’ and he’s right.
2. Follow your nose and pull the thread to see where it leads you. If you read an interview with someone who says something that piques your interest, google them and see what else they’ve got to say. If someone mentions a book, put it on your to-read list. If you read a book that has notes in it, follow the citations in the notes. In short: pull the thread and see where you end up.
3. Build a list over time of reliably interesting sources, both publications and people. As mentioned above, everything is interesting if you’re interested, but some people and publications are more interesting than others. Find those. Some are easy (the FT is good) and some take a bit of ferreting out. It’s usually the case that 20% of your sources will yield 80% of the interesting content, but finding the right 20% can take some time.
4. Set up some tools to make life easier: Tweetdeck to follow people and separate them out into groupings, an RSS reader like Feedly to add blogs/publications with RSS feeds on there, maybe even an separate email alias to subscribe to newsletters, a good podcast app (I find Overcast more useful than the standard ones).

My top most interesting sources:

• @hkanji on Twitter (VC who tweets a lot about all things tech and society)
• Hendrik Laubscher’s weekly e-commerce email roundup
• The FT
• The Harvard Business Review