Improve Your Content Diet, with Polina Marinova

You habitually grab your phone from your pocket to glance at Twitter. “I’ll scroll for just a moment…”, you tell yourself.

But the rush of dopamine from quick-hit news turns a moment on Twitter into an hour on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn and YouTube. Afterwards, you feel like crap. And you can’t remember learning anything useful. What had you been reading anyway? It’s easy to get caught in the stream of entertaining, but unfulfilling, content. 

Polina Marinova, this week's guest on Means of Creation, offers the perfect upgrade to your reading diet. She writes The Profile: a newsletter of the world’s greatest people and companies in business, entertainment, tech, sports, and more. 

She reads literally millions of words every year to find the best profiles to share with her audience. In each piece she writes, Polina always asks, “will the reader learn something from this?” If the answer is no, she doesn’t include it. 

In this interview, we talked to Polina about: 

• The dream scenario for The Profile
• What Polina wants her (eventual) Wikipedia page to say about her
• The other creators that she looks up to
• The thread that ties her career together
• Balancing publishing a lot vs publishing the best
• Something surprising that she’s changed her mind about recently
• And much more

Watch or Listen

We held this conversation live on Friday, September 11th. You can listen to the podcast here or watch the YouTube video here. Enjoy!