Thriving on Overload: The 5 Powers for Success in a World of Exponential Information

Billionaire PayPal cofounder Max Levchin reports, “I tend to come up with precise routines and repeat them obsessively every day. In perfect detail, every morning at home looks the same. By cutting out the contemplation of what to do next, I achieve extreme efficiencies.”

Knowing yourself well enough to select the best times of day for different activities is a superpower that can massively enhance your productivity and effectiveness.

Visual representations allow us to go beyond the linear to represent in one view the way many constituent ideas relate to form a whole.

“Getting comfortable with ‘I’m not sure’ is a vital step to being a better decision maker,” says Duke. “We have to make peace with not knowing.”

For many jobs “know-who” is as or more important than “know-how.” If you know who to ask, you don’t need the knowledge yourself. It is not just a question of knowing who to ask; it requires a relationship that results in people taking the time and effort to help you. Networks of knowledge are also networks of trust and reciprocity.

In the internet and social media age the amount of “noise,” which essentially means information with zero value, has soared exponentially, far beyond the amount of “signal,” referring to information of value.

Our understanding of the world is based on how we bring together the fragments of the world we perceive to create meaning.

“Janus thinking,” which the paper’s author defined as “actively conceiving multiple opposites or antitheses simultaneously.”

intuition and expertise are founded on the ability to recognize patterns. In most instances these patterns are stored unconsciously. This creates a feeling of intuition, that something seems “right” even if it can’t be explained consciously. This means that to achieve expertise in our chosen area, we need to be consistently exposed to patterns so w

Conceding uncertainty frees us to make assessments based on limited information,