Compression vs Content

Compression vs Context is something that I stumbled upon when reading a Praxis Blog Post about Progressive Summarization.

What is Compression Vs Content

Here’s a scenario about the topic

Imagine you are in a situation where you want to learn about investing in the stock market, you don’t want to immediately buy a book about investing as you want to get a gist of what you are getting into, so you go on to your phone and search ‘investing in the stock market’. You decide to read the first blog post you find about this topic which seems legit.

In this scenario, reading a book is a content heavy task. You will have to sit down for at least a couple of hours and take notes about what you are learning to fully understand what this whole stock market thing is about.

However, reading a blog post about the same topic which summarizes the main points in the book is heavily compressed while maintaining the key content information what we need.

So what do we do now? Dedicate a couple of hours reading a book or reading a couple of blog posts and bookmarking the web pages for later reference.

Although the best thing to do is do both or try to find a balance, sometimes it is just not possible. I have been thinking about this problem for a while and I have decided that the best thing to do is to weigh the situation.

When you want to learn how to do cool card tricks to impress your friends at school, you don’t need to learn tricks by reading books. All you have to do is watch a 5 minute video on YouTube and start practicing.

However, if you want to become a real-estate investor, you probably won’t be consuming highly compressed mediums of knowledge such as YouTube videos or blogs. You would want to read a couple of books, watch videos, read blogs, attend a few courses or workshops before starting .

So let me compress the whole paragraph above into a single word:

prioritize

Without prioritizing what is important, we are not able to achieve our goals that we set for ourselves.

This brings me to the end of this blog post. If you are interested in this topic, I have linked some relevant links below.

Stay Epic,

Sharvenium

Further Readings

Progressive Summarization – The blog post that made me think about this Content VS compression

Priorities – A simple blog post about priorities by Seth Godin who is an American Author and former dot com business executive

Content Consumption – A Blog post about content consumption written by me 😀