“Follow Your Nose” — @CedricChin
Why this is in the vault
Cedric’s reading-as-career-investment series — how to read non-fiction strategically (3 categories, land-and-expand, follow-your-nose). RDCO’s vault-and-discover-sources skill stack is built on this foundation; these pieces are the canonical citations.
The core argument
Reading strategy for sustained intellectual progress: follow your genuine curiosity (the book that’s in your hand right now) rather than executing on a virtuous-but-stale reading list. The books you actually finish are the ones you wanted to read; the prescribed-but-unread books generate guilt without producing learning.
Mapping against Ray Data Co
Direct mapping to vault operating principles: (1) the discover-sources skill uses Cedric’s 3-categories taxonomy to triage what to read; (2) the curiosity skill uses ‘follow-your-nose’ as its forcing function for surfacing periphery questions; (3) the process-newsletter skill’s batch-summarization pattern is Cedric’s land-and-expand applied to inbound content.
Related
- 2026-04-15-commoncog-becoming-data-driven-first-principles
- 2026-04-19-commoncog-ultimate-guide-reading-book-a-week
- 2026-04-19-commoncog-land-and-expand-strategy-reading
- backfill-wrapup-commoncog-startherewrap-and-triad-2026-04-19
Source: Follow Your Nose by Cedric Chin (Commoncog). 2405 words. Filed 2026-04-19 as part of Start-Here + Business-Expertise-Triad backfill cohort.