Information Ingestion

Information Ingestion is Kyle’s term, anchored in his notes on How To Take Smart Notes, for consuming everything — reading, listening, attending lectures, tweeting — deliberately, with the conscious purpose that it will become part of one’s Writing and public thinking. As Kyle puts it: “When you do everything deliberately (reading, listening, tweeting, etc.) with the purpose of ‘this will end up as part of my public thinking,’ it changes the way you do all of those things.” This pairs directly with Learning in Public — studying done properly is research, and an idea kept private is as good as one never had.

The book’s argument is that focusing on writing “as if nothing else counts” does not mean reading less or attending fewer lectures — reading is the main source of writing material. Rather, having a clear, tangible purpose makes ingestion sharper: you read in a more engaged way, focus on the most relevant aspects, elaborate on meaning (which aids retrieval), and try to think beyond what you read in order to turn it into something new. Kyle connects this to memory as well — the ability to ingest information and then selectively forget is how you get “the gist” of an idea. He draws a further parallel to Instagram Life: just as people live differently knowing their lives will be posted, deliberate ingestion changes behavior because the input is destined for public output.

Where this appears

• How To Take Smart Notes — its own section heading; the practice of consuming reading/listening/tweeting deliberately as input to public writing, paired with Learning in Public and the “selective forgetting / getting the gist” idea