Whether you want to lose weight, build muscle, or simply stay healthy, diet matters enormously. The quality of what you eat matters, and so does the quantity. The same goes for information. If we compare information to food, we can treat the act of taking it in with a little more care.
They say you are what you eat. In the same way, it seems that the information you mainly consume determines what kind of thinker you become. Just as diet largely decides an athlete's competitiveness, the information you consume decides a knowledge worker's competitiveness.
English
Someone who takes in only domestic information will find it hard to be highly competitive. In Korea, the volume of insight and material is relatively limited. In fact, a lot of Korean content is simply translated from overseas content. Korea doesn't have a large population, after all. In that respect, it also runs a step behind. 1 Even I get most of my productivity-related information from abroad rather than from Korea. Hardly anyone in Korea covers this kind of thing.
That's why I've come to feel the need for English even more lately. Some even say that the language developers will need most is not a programming language like Python but English. Since AI lowers the barriers between languages, saying that studying English is no longer necessary is short-sighted thinking. However good AI is, it can't easily remove your reluctance toward English or adapt you to a culture on your behalf. Just because translators exist doesn't mean Koreans move from Korean communities like Naver Cafe and DC Inside to global communities like Reddit. Even with YouTube's automatic translation, Koreans still subscribe to Korean YouTubers far more.
So I recommend consciously getting involved in global communities. In many ways, it's better to play in the big pond. On Twitter in particular, I'd recommend reading posts from overseas as well. Here's why...
Footnotes
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Of course, in hot fields, news can reach Korea within hours. These days, with the help of AI, information spreads much faster. ↩