Learning grows with immersion, not information
Three tiers of learning, and why the amount of content you consume is the wrong thing to measure.
Shorts and reels
They create a feeling of learning, but they rarely build strong memory. You consume the video as one of thousands of others. To actually remember something you have to sink into the topic: take notes, repeat the ideas, connect them to what you already know.
LLMs, long articles, long videos
This is already better. You’re focused on a problem, and your brain starts sorting ideas onto mental shelves. But if the learning stays too fragmented, it can still fail to move into long-term memory.
Books and courses
For me this is the strongest way to build deep knowledge. It takes days, sometimes weeks. You come back to the same material again and again, you fall asleep with these ideas and wake up with them, and the connections gradually get stronger.
So real learning, for me, is not about how much content I consume. It’s about how much time I give my brain to absorb it, connect it to what was already there, repeat it, sleep on it, and finally turn it into something durable.
The main thing is not the amount of material. The main thing is the time spent actually understanding it.