My Obsession: The Consumption of Information

I have a confession to make: I’m addicted to consuming information. You see, I’ve always had this infinite curiosity to learn more. In college I took 21+ credits per semester, took Winter and Summer courses, and juggled 3+ jobs and my own business. During college I consumed as much info as possible. I read several websites per day, regularly read The New York Times, Wall St. Journal and Hartford Courant. All of the books on the suggested reading list? Yep, those would be done before the class started, usually.

Now several years out of college and full-time into my career, I still consume as much information as possible. Anything and everything, I’ve always had a weird obsession with consuming information.

I never really thought about it until recently when I realized that whenever I bring up how much information I consume, I get weird, dazed and confused looks from people. I swear, I’m normal, as far as I can tell. You might like baking or working on your car. Me? I like learning. In fact, I love it. The way I learn is through consuming as much information as possible.

An Overview of My Consumption

To fully understand how much information I consume, let’s take a look at my sources and frequency of consumption:

• Blogs: On average, I read 400-600 articles per day from a couple hundred blogs that I’m subscribed to and 100+ people that share interesting stories with me. This breaks up into a variety of subjects including marketing, social media, business, food, music and news. I share the most interesting articles per day over.  You can check it out over on my Google profile, subscribe via RSS or follow @jlevymedia.
• Books: I read about a book or so per week. In case you’re new around here, I share reviews of most of them. The books I read are typically business books but I also love biographies and anything that provides the reader a behind-the-scenes view.
• Magazines: I subscribe to a healthy number of magazines (affiliate links): Fast Company, Inc., Entrepreneur, Fortune, Men’s Health, Rolling Stone, Wired, GQ and Food Network.
• News: I start my day out by reading the online editions of The New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall St. Journal, Washington Post, and Politico. I also watch CNN at several points throughout the day and usually check-in over on their website or iPhone app a couple times during the day as well. Additionally, I keep tabs open for Google News, Techmeme and will usually check in with The Guardian or other international publications a few times per week.  If you’re looking for a good list of international news sites to check out, Christopher Penn provided his list.
• Podcasts: I don’t subscribe to as nearly many podcasts as some of my friends but I do love the content from some of them such as (iTunes links): Marketing Over Coffee, Media Hacks, Loaded, TED, and Managing the Gray.
• Miscellaneous: I consume a lot of other content that aren’t so much on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule but occur as they’re published or available such as webinars, eBooks, whitepapers, videos and other forms of online content. Also, besides the magazines that I already subscribe to, occasionally I pick up another magazine based on an interesting article or feature.

Yes, I know, your first reaction is either that it’s not possible to consume that much information or that I’m spending all day reading. I assure you that it is possible and that I’m not spending *all* day consuming information. Remember, I still have a day job at New Marketing Labs, own Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse and as of recently, was busy writing a book. But, I do spend hours per day, virtually every spare minute available to me, trying to get my hands on information and news.

Why I Consume So Much

Besides the many reasons I’ve already listed, I view consuming information as part of doing the advanced work. It helps drive me and provides me examples of what others are doing. This provides me with resources that I can use to improve myself both personally and professionally and also provides me with stuff to share with you. It’s free or very low cost learning. How can you beat that?

I also find that it makes me more knowledgeable on a variety of topics which helps me in business deals especially since I work across verticals and with muti-national clients, partners and vendors.

Sure, a lot of the information I read is duplicative especially between news sources. That’s ok though. It provides with me with multiple viewpoints on a single story thus allowing me to take all of the information available and make my own decisions instead of having someone else spin it for me.

Oh yeah, two other very simple reasons: I get bored easily and I travel way too much.

Your Consumption of Information

Your consumption of information may vary. It may be more or it may be less. It may be focused more in one vertical or one form of media. But, I encourage you to step outside of the sources you’re currently consuming and find a few new ones.

What are the sources of information that you find important to consume?

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Photo Credit: karlfrankowski