Progressive Summarization and the Power Law of Information

The speaker spends significant time distilling and understanding other people's ideas, organizing them, and reducing excess information. Through progressive summarization, they learned that the best 1 to 5% of information in a book is significantly more relevant than the rest. They highlight, make notes, and then progressively summarize the best parts of the book, emphasizing the importance of efficient expression of ideas through thorough referencing while maintaining a coherent train of thought.