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

you need to establish a consistent set of portals and habits that support your objectives. These will include daily routines as well as some sources accessed less regularly.

To move up: What is this an example or instance of? To move down: What is an example or instance of this?

To improve performance, decisions must result in outcomes you can observe and learn from, designed to surface whatever information will be most valuable for your next decision. As much as possible make iterative decisions, building on lessons learned from previous ones.

Your adventures in information and ideas can feed your process of finding where you are called to invest your energy.

Mark Beeman, whom you will meet again later in this book, explain that “we continuously build mental models of the world around us—our boxes—to help predict what will happen next. Any deviation from these expectations causes a group of neurons to shout in synchrony to signal that something is different, unexpected, or just wrong. And those brainwav

When you seek to identify whether information serves you well, the most important consideration is if it enhances your mental models. You must be highly aware of whether information fits with your current thinking. Identifying data that supports your thinking is natural and can be useful. However, you also need to seek the most interesting evidence

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

In selecting your frame, the most important consideration is utility. Some topics can simply be too broad to pretend to keep up with. Being more focused allows you to maintain your edge and expertise.

Surprises are immensely more valuable than finding what you expect.

Information serves us if it helps us to understand the world better, make better decisions, and live more fulfilled lives, even in the smallest way. Information does not serve us well if it misleads us, reinforces our biases, makes us unhappy, or simply wastes our time and attention by being irrelevant to our intentions.