2009 December | Aaron Burke

It’s become clear to me recently that one of the more useful skills a person can posses in these times is the ability to sift through the wealth of information strewn about everywhere to find the best and most useful piece of information at that particular moment. It’s true that google has done a wonderful job at sorting information into groups that are relevant based on particular phrases or words, but as of right now it can’t go any deeper than that in terms of delivering information relevant specifically to me as a person. Google doesn’t know whether or not I have time to read a 1000-word article, or listen to a 45-minute podcast. It categorizes in general what is useful, but not what is specifically useful to me. That level of sorting needs to be done by me, and it takes skill to do so quickly and rapidly. When I execute a google search, in some way all of the information presented to me could be useful, but in no way do I have the time or inclination to read all of it. How do I determine what pieces of information will be most relevant to me at this specific point in time? How do I maximize the impact of the time I spend digesting any set of information?

The old adage “information is power” is no longer relevant in today’s world. Right now information is not power. Everyone has information. In fact, a valid case could be made that too much information is less power, because as more time is spent on reading and parsing information, less time is available to act on that information which could have had the most impact.

So in our times, it is more appropriate to say “the right information is power.” (And, no doubt, someone far more forward-thinking than me has likely said this very thing years ago. But let’s just gloss over that for a moment.)

My point here is my realization that the ability to sift through mediocre and good information to find the really great information, and the ability to filter out that which is not important is a skillset which is becoming increasingly necessary. I suppose much of this line of thought was prompted by a search on Amazon for books on social media. The stack of books that was thrown at me by Amazon’s “relevant titles” was ridiculous. What really freaked me out was that all the books actually looked good, were written by fairly prominent authors, and had been published in the last year. I instantly wanted to buy and read about a dozen of them. Ridiculous. “Choose one or two Aaron,” I thought.

But which ones? Is there one which will be best for me in my situation right now? So I looked through the reviews, read the excerpts, and whittled the list down to 2. I have absolutely no idea whether I made a good or a bad choice. But I did am slowly learning about the value of processing and sorting information into what will allow me to be more effective.

Is it possible that in the future, information processing and sorting systems will be so powerful, and have gathered so much specific data on us that they will be able to deliver with amazing accuracy the information and data that is perfect for us in each moment? Will we be living with predictive models so sophisticated that a search for tennis rackets will deliver those models suited specifically to my skill level based on knowing that I played on my high school varsity team, but have been an infrequent player for several years? And will we even want to live with so much about ourselves known and stored in massive data factories? Ok, that was just my Skynet/scary robots/evil computers nasty thought of the week. Apologies.

But really, about the dealing with massive amounts of information effectively thing. It’s important.

Movember. Wow, who would have thought growing a mustache would be so frickin hard? About halfway through I was seriously wishing that I was training for a marathon. I mean, I got a lot of grief from women. Maybe they would be been nicer if I was raising money for breast cancer research instead of prostate and testicular cancer research. But hey, cancer is cancer and any time you’re raising money for ANY kind of cancer research, it does have benefits overall for every type. And given that 4 of my grandparents and 1 of my parents all died from different forms of cancer, it’s something that’s pretty important to me.

So a huge thank you to all who supported me or donated money. It was actually a pretty cool experience, topped off by a gala party last Thursday night with a whole lot of other Movember participants (and Mo Sisters.) I didn’t know what to expect, going to a party in SF with a bunch of dudes sporting staches, but it was actually a blast and hilarious to boot. People were going all out for the costume contests and for the “Man of Movember” grand prize. The crowd was good, everyone was into the whole thing, and for a Thursday evening it kicked ass.

But wow, does it feel nice to be clean shaven again.

Back in my junior year of high school I was first introduced to the kind of Newtonian Mechanics physics that can be both incredibly useful in real life use (looking at the where forces are applied in a system, calculating collisions and projectile flight paths) and can also be a total pain in the ass. The reason it’s a total pain in the ass in that when analyzing any system to see what the result will be given a specific set of starting conditions, the most important aspect of the analysis is not being able to do the math involved. Really, for all intents and purposes, pretty much all math you use in Newtonian Physics doesn’t get any more difficult than basic algebra. No, the hard part about analyzing these systems actually comes in setting up the analysis. See, you have to be able to look at a given system and be able to set up how the equations interact and which forces are being applied where. Once you have the whole thing set up – once the framework is in place to analyze the system, then the actual process of calculating the results is fairly trivial.

So what does this have to do with business? Maybe nothing. But as I was staring at an example chart in Tom’s Planner today (which is a beta version of an online Gantt Chart tool) I started looking at all the steps listed in that chart. I began thinking that the real key to getting a long project isn’t about being able to execute all the individual steps. In most cases, the steps are easy, can be figured out, or can be farmed out to a VA if that’s something you’re cool with.

No, the difficult part is actually planning the whole project out. It’s figuring out how all the little pieces interact, knowing which dominoes need to fall first, and which parts of the project can run on their own while others are taken care of concurrently. Charting the path from where you are to a completed project is the difficult aspect of any project, and it’s also, not surprisingly, the most important part as well. I guess that’s why the people who are able to plan things out, manage people, fit people in to the tasks at hand, and assess the progress of the whole end up making the big bucks, and the individuals who execute the tasks get laid off when they’re not needed.

It kind of makes me miss physics.

But I think I might need to go to business school.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

As humans, it seems that we are genetically programmed to always want more. And I suppose there is an excellent reason for the desire to always want more, to always feel that more is necessary in order to be happy and fulfilled. As much as it sucks to lose a job and then have to realign your priorities while living on unemployment, it would suck an order of magnitude more to think you are set with food for the winter, and then have mold ruin all your grain, and then starve to death with nothing to eat. So I can understand the need to always reach for more, to feel that another step has to be taken, that your situation can always be improved.

And from this, we come to Maslow.

About 10 days ago or so at a friend’s party I ended up talking to one of the girls there – who I guess had recently finished an MBA program – and we got to talking about needs as humans. My generation has so much in its favor – so many choices, so much freedom, and often so much ease at our fingertips – yet this almost paradoxically has created seemingly greater unhappiness in our culture. Maybe it stems from this feeling that nearly anything is possible and that we all can be amazingly successful. Perhaps for many people, anything short of brilliance and achievements that set the world on fire can lead to feelings of inadequacy.

But as we talked we got onto the subject of Abraham Maslow and some of the work he did with the human condition and what people search for. He came to some really interesting (and, if you’re anything like me, really frustrating) conclusions regarding what he referred to as a “Hierarchy of Needs”. Essentially, humans are creatures that are, by nature, almost never satisfied. We have basic needs which are those we require to sustain us and keep us alive. But once we have secured enough food and water to keep up alive for a while and we are not constantly worried about death by starvation, we start to look for a safe place to live – somewhere to be sheltered from the elements or from any creatures looking to do us harm. And, having satisfied those basic needs, we don’t just stop and say “Hey, this is pretty cool, I think I’m probably not going to die anytime soon. Sweet!” Nope, we start thinking “well, I’m a bit lonely now. Some other people might be nice to have around. And women. Women! They look nice. Let’s find at least one of those.”

So, having found a group of people to interact with, and a good woman to love and be loved by, do we think we have a pretty wonderful life? Maybe. But we’ll still probably want more. We want to feel good at something, and be recognized for that. So should we become chief or leader of our little group, with everyone looking up to us for advice and wisdom, what should we feel? Powerful? Satisfied in our place in the world? Well, it’s possible. But… what are we here for? What is our purpose? Can we leave the world a better place in some way? What if no one remembers us when we’re gone?

And so we come to the angst of my generation. Here in the United States, in this 21st century, when you look at people who have grown up in middle class or above families, no other group in history has had so much opportunity for education, for self-expression, for intellectual curiosity, and for choice. We may worry about car payments, but the chance we are worrying about food and shelter is pretty low. Most of us have a support network, and the safety net the government provides is there as well. And without the burden of so many basic needs worries, many of us are experiencing feelings of confusion, many are feeling lost knowing that there is something we should be doing, something we’ll be amazing at and recognized for, or some way to contribute back to the world. But for many of us, we lack the tools or training to figure out what the contribution can be. Rather than figuring out jobs that pay well, many of us are focusing on careers that will make us happy and leave us feeling fulfilled.

School doesn’t prepare us for that. We don’t receive training on self-actualization. School can provide an environment where accomplishment is recognized and rewarded, but once we leave school this is frequently absent.

So how does one navigate in this new 21st century reality? How do we adapt our society to one in which, increasingly, the bottom tiers of this hierarchy of needs will almost automatically be fulfilled and people’s efforts will go towards satisfying the top tier? What training do we need to be providing our children to successfully navigate this new psychological reality?

Well, hopefully I’ll have it figured out a little better myself so I can be a good example and teacher to my children (once I find my way out of this selfish phase and feel mature enough to have them, that is.)

And good luck to any of you feeling lost because your life is too easy!

Like Sifting Grains of Sand

Movember, start to finish

How Physics and Business are the Same

Oh Maslow, Why Do You Trouble Me So?

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