How to Use Vertical Research to Find Inspiration and Curious Content

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Today at a Glance:

Learning is a skill—but we need a new way to approach learning that is fast, nimble, and tailored for our ever-changing digital reality.

The framework for learning anything: (1) Identify & Establish, (2) Research, (3) Skin in the Game, (4) Engage Community, (5) Teach, and (6) Reflect & Review.

The New Way to Learn

Learning is a skill—arguably the most important skill. But unfortunately, despite its importance to your career and life, it’s not one you’re ever explicitly taught how to approach.

Let’s fix that.

Today, I will share a tactical approach to learning anything.

Introduction

Curiosity and inspiration are not predictable—they strike at random (and often inopportune!) times. But they must be acted on.

Growth is a natural byproduct of acting on curiosity and inspiration.

“Inspiration is perishable. When you have inspiration, act on it right then and there.” - Naval

Ok, so let’s assume you've been bit by the curiosity bug and are ready to act on it. Now what? You’re inspired and motivated to learn, but you don’t even know where to begin.

All your years of school didn't really prepare you for this. The "old way" of researching and learning—reading textbooks cover-to-cover, checking books out of the library, scouring footnotes for primary and secondary sources—is slow, arduous, and a relic of our analog, industrial past. It may work for school (e.g. if you are writing a final thesis or research paper), but it fails spectacularly in the real world.

You need a "new way"—a fast, dynamic, and nimble approach tailored to the new, ever-changing digital reality. I’d like to propose a “new way” for consideration.

This learning framework involves six key steps:

Identify & Establish

Research

Skin in the Game

Engage Community

Teach

Reflect & Review

The general structure is fixed, but its application is intended to be dynamic & iterative.

Let's walk through the steps...

Identify & Establish

The framework begins with a blank page—one that you will progressively fill out as you work through the steps.

Identify the topic and quickly write down everything you know about it. Put the topic at the top of the page and drop in the extent of your current knowledge below it. It’s ok if you know nothing about it. The goal is just to get something down on the page. There are very few things as intimidating as starting from zero, so we can use this quick blast to engage in some mental trickery to get going.

Here’s a simple example of what this start might look like. Nothing fancy (other than my cool snake emoji icon).

I use Notion for my notetaking—I like being able to pull in other links and resources—but anything works (including pen and paper if you are old fashioned).

Paradoxically, starting by writing what you do know is the best way to highlight what you don't know. This first action highlights the gaps in your knowledge and understanding of the topic. The goal here is simply to set the stage—establish the holes before filling them.

Research

This is where the real fun begins—it’s time to learn.

The most effective strategy for research: start horizontal, then go vertical.

Horizontal = Breadth

Vertical = Depth

With apologies for the poor artistry—though I might be able to sell this as an NFT for $2 million—this is a simple graphic of how to think about the time spent in each phase. The bulk of your time and learning will occur in the vertical research phase (red), but the horizontal research phase (green) is critical to foundation-setting.

Allow me to elaborate:

Horiztonal Research

Horizontal research lays the foundation for your learning. When you start horizontal, you gather information across the full breadth of the topic area. This gives you the capacity to "see the entire field”—it draws a surface-level map of the topic.

With horizontal research, it’s perfectly acceptable to keep it simple: Google and Wikipedia (sorry to all of my high school teachers!) are both great tools.

Use your note-taking workspace to document the horizontal information. Take notes on the key pillars of a topic, add screenshots or links where relevant, and mark any particularly interesting areas for a deep-dive.

Note the underlying sources that provided the horizontal information (i.e. look at the Wikipedia footnotes), which will come in handy as guideposts to focus your journey when you go vertical.

Vertical Research

Vertical research is where you dive down the proverbial rabbit hole.

Vertical research was historically much more challenging—it typically required hours of finding and reading long, dense books on a topic. But in the Information Age, we have a diverse array of tools that provide much higher time leverage.

These tools include (but are not limited to):

Reddit

Twitter

Newsletters

Podcasts

Expert Networks

Books (The New Way)

A few ideas and perspectives on how to use each tool:

Reddit

Reddit is a treasure trove of interesting information. It’s great for finding inspiration and curiosity-inducing content, but it’s equally effective for diving deep on a single topic.

Search your topic, find subreddits and threads, read the commentary, and click through to the links. Comment and ask questions where relevant.

Twitter

Twitter is an amazing source of information if you use it correctly.

Spend some time searching around to find the authority figures on a given topic. Read what they are writing and commenting on, follow their content trail to any longer-form work they are producing.

@ them or DM them if you are feeling ambitious and want to learn more.

Newsletters

Take advantage of the boom in individual newsletters.

Thought leaders on most every topic are writing one, and most of them are free. You can typically use Twitter to find the newsletters quite efficiently.

Podcasts

Podcasts can be hit-or-miss.

Focus on primary sources—discussions with founders, leaders, or experts—avoid low value podcasts with armchair experts commenting on a topic outside of their circle of competence. Look at the number of reviews or listeners to get a feel for the signal-richness of the cont...