It used to be that information was rare. So to find it you had to use tricks like knowing what person in the village had some books or knew how to do that thing

It used to be that information was rare. So to find it you had to use tricks like knowing what person in the village had some books or knew how to do that thing you heard about. Now information is abundant, so abundant in fact that it's clearly impossible to fit even 1% of it into your head in one human lifetime. So the meta-skill is figuring out which of the finite number of things you actually want to learn. I suggest going upstream as much as possible. Are there any topics where your interests converge before they split off to many disciplines? Read books about that. The more you can get upstream of stuff the eaiser it is to tell where real novelty and interesting information is (in my experience).