Being The Person Who Knows The Domain Is The Whole Job

Being the person who knows the domain is, for many of us, the whole job.

Gotta be an expert to market, sell, or develop for an expert.

But the amount of reading required to stay that person in any industry — narwhal botany, freight, AI, is, according to recent estimates I just made up, roughly 4 quadrillion times the hours available to a human being.

So you built an AI slop agent that sends you morning updates.

Good start, MiniJensen. But it’s actually hurting you. Reading those summaries gives you the illusion that you’re on top of things. You’re not.

It’s the media consumption diet equivalent of pairing a Diet Coke with a pineapple pizza.

Garbage in, garbage out — except the garbage arrives on schedule, beautifully summarized.

There aren’t any shortcuts to being an expert. But there is experience. So here are five things that move the needle for me:

1. Build reading streaks. I ignore my “READ” calendar block more often than I ignore your calls (burn!). Then I noticed that the demonic Duolingo owl was the only force keeping me on the quasi-Spanish bike. So I downloaded Streaks. My reading habit now runs entirely on fear of a red and white checkmark. Not proud. Extremely effective. Worked for Seinfeld too. What’s the deal with that?

2. Follow humans with actual opinions, not news factories. Takes, not news, train you to cultivate your own takes. Twitter lists scale this fast (then curate down, ruthlessly).

3. Forward stuff. A lot. When people forward back, congrats — you’ve built a source-discovery engine out of nothing but being generous.

4. Read is not retained. Readwise Reader is the GOAT for reading and retaining articles, emails, and anything else with letters. It lets you read, highlight, tag, summarize, and query. I guarantee that nothing helps retention better than forcing yourself to summarize an article in 20 seconds when you finish reading it. I can also search the whole corpus over MCP now (nerd ftw).

5. Fine, an AI database. You caught me. I do actually have one too. 29 feeds, scraped every morning at 7am, each article auto-tagged and summarized into a local database by a local model (gotta make my laptop fan work for its salary). The database itself is what matters, since it’s killer at finding historical anecdotes, trends, etc. It does the grunt work; I do the thinking.

Anyway. Still drinking the Diet Coke. Just no longer pretending it’s lunch.

How do you stay on top of your field?

This post started as a LinkedIn post. If you want more of this in your feed, follow me on LinkedIn.