Stop watching the news.

“It’s my responsibility to be informed!” you say. Don’t worry, the endless chaos, tragedy, and hopeless depression will be waiting to fill your entire brain any time you’re ready.

Is it self-indulgent to focus on what you want to? Maybe.

But our focus may be the last "inch" we have.

From V for Vendetta: “An inch...it is small and it is fragile, but it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.”

Back in the College Dropout days, when Kanye was still cool, he talked about doing “five beats a day for three summers.” The concept always stuck with me.

It’s not just something he did, it was a path—a prescription for those who wanted to master a skill.

This summer, I wrestled with two small children at home. In some ways, one of the hardest summers I’ve ever had, as my entire industry repeatedly turns itself upside down.

But in addition to watching two new life forms flourish, I got to feel something new.

I got to feel my favorite feeling of being alive: the feeling that only comes from experiencing the magic of technology.

I felt it playing the first game on a calculator. I felt it when I had my first synthesizer. I felt it when I edited my first video on tape in high school. I felt it the first time I owned turntables. I felt it when I learned the superpower of SEO. And now, I feel it with this magical new wave.

Is part of this time terrifying? Sure. But it’s also unbelievably exciting, like a dream come true in some ways.

…you’re not really learning.

Granted, we’re not talking about a torturous pre-med textbook that you have to fight through for a noble cause here.

We’re talking about the day-to-day of reading books and studying new things.

If you’re not excited by what you’re consuming, chances are you aren’t really learning anything of value to you.

When you can’t put something down, when you need to spend just a few more minutes, when you wake up eager to jot down that note so you don’t forget, that’s when you know you’re up to something real.

You need two things:

1. A media outlet
2. Your own AI

My background is in audio. I’ve taught 30,000+ people skills in the world of professional audio.

But other friends of mine started their path in the world of film—in video.

Learning how to mix engineer audio fundamentally changes the way you think about sound. About the makeup and distribution of the frequencies all around us.

I’m amazed at how much this skill translates to a seemingly unrelated skill: color correcting in video.

Once you understand that a signal can be split into its component frequencies and adjusted, you have a framework for understanding both the frequencies of sound and of light.

Each reinforces the other.

There are so many areas in life where one skill translates to an unexpected other.

If you want to solve computer (coding) problems, listen to computer (electronic) music. They feed each other.

That’s where exponential learning begins.