My friends often tell me the news feels like a scheduled appointment with despair. They say it’s more fun to scroll through endless photos of other people’s holidays on Instagram. I understand the feeling completely. You look at your phone for two minutes and learn about five new global problems. Your brain can start to feel like it’s full of anxious static instead of thoughts. I am not a fan of my brain turning to mush. So I decided to run a small experiment. I built myself a "good flow." This is just a simple way to filter the information I see every day. I pick topics I actually want to learn about. Then my flow searches for the latest good news and useful articles on them. Think of it as hiring a tiny, polite bouncer for your mind. Only the interesting stuff gets past the velvet rope. For example, I'm trying to get better at trading. My flow brings me fresh information about how to do that. It skips all the screaming headlines. I also have a casual interest in how old clocks work. So I might get an article about mechanical gears. I do not get an article about celebrity arguments. I have effectively traded outrage for actual knowledge. It seems like a fair deal. After two months of this, something strange happened. I realized my knowledge was starting to form a T shape. The vertical bar of the T is deep expertise in one or two subjects. For me, that was trading. I was getting a steady stream of detailed information, so my understanding went deeper. The horizontal bar of the T is a broad knowledge of many different topics. All those little side interests, like the clocks or maybe sustainable farming, started building out that top bar. My T shape got a lot bigger. I now have a much stronger grasp of my main topics. I have a wider understanding of other things too. This has some unusual side effects. You might find yourself at a dinner party explaining how the logistics of the global coffee bean supply can influence a market trend you read about that morning. Your friends will either think you are brilliant or a complete weirdo. I am aiming for brilliant, but I will accept weirdo. This little project has worked well for me. It helped me learn without feeling overwhelmed. It also made me curious about other people. So I have a question for you. What topics do you read about to improve your own knowledge? What are you using to build your T shape, or what would you want to learn about if you could tune out all the noise? You made it ! No picture and you came to the end .... So what is your answer?