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

“The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers,” he says.3 Among the aptitudes Pink puts at the center of success in this era is what he calls “symphonic thinking.” “Symphony . . . is the ability to put together the pieces,” Pink writes. “It

Of particular interest to us is openness to experience. This can also be framed as openness to new information: our ability to adapt by noticing that the world has changed, accepting rather than rejecting relevant signals, and as a result, changing our outlook, opinions, and actions. In a swiftly evolving world, people who are less open to new info

changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem-solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties,”

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.

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.

Learning in the expectation of having to teach others has been proven to improve how students organize their knowledge.39 This so-called protégé effect has been clearly demonstrated by the superior learning performance of those students who are also tutoring.

Rather than sources, we should think about “portals,” the doorways through which we discover information, each with distinctive characteristics in how they filter and aggregate inputs.

We should adopt as a core precept the adage of influential social scientist Gregory Bateson: “Knowledge comes from but a single perspective; wisdom comes from multiple perspectives.”

As we grow to understand cognitive bias, we need to be highly attentive to whether we want new information to be true.