Optimizing Knowledge Intake Using Half-Life Growth Hacking Techniques

This 1 Neat Trick Bloggers Do NOT Want You to Know

Jenn Schiffer
CSS Perverts
Published in
3 min readDec 8, 2013

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“I read Hacker News today, oh boy.” — John Lennon, 1967

New programming students are typically shocked to find that a lot of time goes towards the learning process, and not actually into writing code. Being 10x without reading is not a sustainable strategy, as there is an exponential decrease in x with every tech blog left unread in one’s RSS reader. There is simply not enough time in the day, though, to develop award-winning websites and read all of the intellectual commentary on life given by other people who build award-wining websites.

A special group of developers have come out in the past several months to disrupt how we learn about the industry in the most efficient way possible. They do this by only reading a small percentage of the articles they open. They’ve discovered that not going far beyond the headline is how knowledge grows best. And now hackers can use it to grow, too.

Growth + Hackers = Growth Hackers

#Growthhackers are known to use low-cost methods to market a product, normally with social media. They use the same low-cost model to apply to their attention span so that they have the ability to say they’ve read all of the blogs and articles about a subject while only having read no more than 60% of them.

An army of approximately 8700 Growth Hackers helped spread this story and they did not even have to read beyond the title and first sentence like the rest of us bonehead developers did.

The best bloggers in the game, at least the ones we should pay attention to, know that the best SEO techniques to garner Google Juice™ includes using strong keywords in the headline and post thesis. Thus, most of the information, hereto therefore, is held within those two sections. The fact that we are fortunate to have these growth hackers show us that we are reading far too much content is moot.

By using this one neat trick, we are now able to make better use of our time building award-winning websites or jumping right into a debate whose info was laid out in a blog post we’ve only read a tiny portion of. This greatly improves our discourse as well, because when different people in a debate have different levels of information about the topic, it is obvious that better conclusions will be made.

It’s time to grow. Time to hack. Growth hacking.

Jon Shiffer is a #growthhacker and technical editor of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, “PHP is Better Than CSS.” He teaches pickup artists all over America how to code, but what he really needs to learn, himself, is how to love.

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