An important skill in the AI era, next to knowing what to build, is knowing what to consume.
The tools are so powerful that you can summarize what people share and surround yourself with their ideas and wisdom. This is amazing, and can speed up your learning tremendously.
The hard part is knowing who actually has something valuable to say.
This lesson explains how I filter through the noise and find the people that have something valuable to say.
You need to be very careful about who you listen to. The people and ideas you surround yourself with will shape how you think and who you become to some degree. From the very start of my career, I put a lot of effort into finding the right people to learn from.
You are the average of the five people
you spend the most time with
This quote is kinda cliché, but it’s true. It’s why you need to be careful about who you spend time with. This doesn’t apply just to people you interact with. What podcasts you listen to, what books you read, what articles you read, shape your thinking and behavior as well.
If you choose the wrong sources, you’ll slowly drift in the wrong direction. It’s now also harder than ever to know who to listen to, since everyone can fake expertise with AI. Having the right judgment is one of the most important skills you can develop as it literally shapes the rest of your life.
If you were trying to get better at making YouTube videos, you wouldn’t want to learn from someone that gets 20 views, right? As long as your goal is to reach a certain size of audience, you would naturally gravitate towards people that have a proven track record.
Many of you reading this have enrolled in animations.dev (my animation course) in the past. Some of you have said that you made that choice because I have made popular open-source components that have proven to you that I am competent at building things that revolve around animation. I have shown you proof of work.
If you want to build great products that people actually want to use, you should learn from people that have done it in the past.
If I wanted to learn font design, I would look at who has designed a great font in the past. I would stumble upon people like Rasmus and read everything they have ever said about fonts, because they made Inter. I wouldn’t search for the most viral typography thread.
You need to look for proof of work. Can you clearly justify why you want to learn from them? What have they produced that people clearly want to use or admire?
Shipped work that strangers pay for or depend on is the best signal there is.
Before taking someone’s advice, open their GitHub or personal site. Find something they built that people actually use: a product, an open-source library, something tangible.
This doesn't necessarily have to be a product they have built. Some people work at great companies and share insightful thoughts without having built anything on the side. Certain companies are incredibly hard to get into, so being employed there is a great signal of competence in itself.
This is also why followers and likes are not a great proxy for what’s good and what’s not.
Many people are good at posting shiny things, but as soon as you look for any tangible work, it falls apart. Mainly because building is a completely different skill, and that’s the skill you actually want.
And don’t get me wrong, a person can be a great builder and be great at posting on X as well. You just need to be careful not to confuse the two.
It’s also worth noting that arguably, the best people don’t share their work and thoughts with the world, just the results of it. This is unfortunate for us in this specific case assuming we want to learn from them.
The good news is that you can still learn from them by using the things they’ve created. There are many great designers at Apple that are basically invisible, but their work is still used by millions, if not billions of people every day.
Use the fruits of their labor. If you want to build better iOS apps, next time you use your phone, pay attention to the design and how it feels to use. Try to understand and articulate the design decisions that were made.
This is just one example, but you can apply this to any field.
Once you’ve found someone that you want to learn from by identifying their proof of work, you can extend this idea further. If you like their work, it’s likely that you will like the work of the people they follow and admire.
A simple trick here is to look at who they follow on their public profiles and browse from there. It drastically narrows down the list of people you need to consider.
After you’ve found your group of people that inspire you, you can use AI to help you surround yourself with their ideas and wisdom. We will talk about how to do that in the next lesson.
Your homework will be to find your group of people that you would want to learn from. This can be a wide range of people, from developers to designers to entrepreneurs to investors, or even people from completely different fields like Jiro Ono, a Japanese sushi chef.
To give you some inspiration, here’s my group of people I follow closely and draw inspiration from:
Shares interesting insights on software. Co-founded HashiCorp, created Terraform and Ghostty. Now building Superlogical.
CEO of Obsidian. Has a lot of good writing on his personal site.
Swiss designer and MIT engineer who founded Cron, a calendar acquired by Notion. Now a general partner at Y Combinator.
Designed the Inter typeface and helped build Figma, Spotify, GraphQL, and Facebook. Now building Playbit.
Researches tools for thought, with a focus on memory, reading, and attention. Before that he helped build iOS at Apple.
Designer at SpaceX SI. His studio, Play, has done work for OpenAI, Figma, and Stripe.
Head of design at X and SpaceX SI. Before that he founded the studio behind Family, the wallet that has set the bar for crypto apps.
Designed at Cursor, Notion, and Stripe. He also built ryOS, a playful take on classic macOS that runs in the browser.
Does design and code at Oxide, after years at Pentagram. Big fan of his work.
Builds at SpaceX SI, previously at Cursor. He co-founded Skiff, the private email suite acquired by Notion, and was its CTO.