Inform Me

We live in an information age where everything you need or want is already at your finger tips. Your ability to learn and grow depends on your willingness to absorb the right information and your decisions to reject the lies that can often be easier to believe.

Information can be used to empower people, manipulate and blackmail others; it can be used to hold people accountable or hostage and it can be manipulated to win an election or control an entire nation. Information is wielded as a powerful weapon which is why we hear ‘Information is power’.

Withholding the right information can be detrimental to the growth of people, companies, organisations or even nations. Withholding the wrong information can be life saving and rebalancing information can be liberating.

I recall the story of 7 year old Thomas Edison who didn’t get on with the school system and stormed home after being described as ‘addled’ by his teacher suggesting he was mentally ill. His mom chose to home school him from that point on and helped channel the path of a pioneer whose breakthroughs had impacts that were world changing.

Information can be consumed from those around us – words spoken by a teacher to their students will either inspire them to greatness or destroy their sense of belief and self-esteem; their words can result in life changing decisions. I recall attending a parent teacher’s evening and my son’s sixth form teacher told me how good he was in Economics and even opined that my son’s thought process was way ahead of his even though he was supposed to be the teacher.

Fast forward a few years, a first class degree in Economics and Econometrics and a successful investment Banking career is partly thanks to a teacher who highlighted the potential he saw so generously. He helped us to appreciate just how good he was in Economics and we followed this up as parents to help leverage this gift.

On the flip side, another teacher once sent for me to tell me my son couldn’t get into a particular secondary school and gave me all the reasons for that. I thanked them for the information and leveraged it to coach my son who ended up being the first person to get into that school that was outside the catchment area of the town we lived in.

The teacher went as far as to tell me that even if my son got into that school he would not be able to cope. He not only went to that school, he completed his sixth form and made an excellent degree from a top university and became a chartered accountant without missing a beat.

I took the information each teacher gave me – negative or positive – and I used it to my advantage and to the benefits of my children.

Everyday we are given or bombarded with information that can be upsetting, make us angry, educate or challenge us, or make us do and say really dumb things. The choice is always ours to make.

There are people who have never seen a copy of their country’s constitution and yet they are social media warriors on how politics is played in their country; many end up putting out content that is foolish at best but sadly even lazier people who never bother to check what they are being told believe and share their nonsensical contents. Politicians also know how to leverage information that they know most of their constituents will never cross-check to sway them to make ill-informed decisions and consequently many nations are held hostage by the same people for decades.

The right diagnosis is good information that can be the difference between life and death or improve the recovery chances of patients. Good information helps doctors to offer the right advice and the patients to make the right decisions. Where substandard health care is offered, you will always see a culture of lack of information where the patient is subservient to and feels like they dare not question anything the expert says.

Information is a weapon in the hands of those who control the narratives and this can be at a national level where entire nations are only shown and told what their leaders want them to think and believe. It’s no wonder that we see mass brain-washing of people as wrong information is consistently drip-fed to them but what is truly sad is their willingness to hold on to the misinformation or disinformation even when the truth is staring them in the face.

I love this phrase that I came across which says, ‘A fact is information minus emotion. An opinion is information plus experience. Ignorance is an opinion lacking information. And, stupidity is an opinion that ignores a fact’.

Recognise when you are stating a fact or being told a fact, listen to the opinions of others even as you share yours, curb your ignorance and don’t subject yourself to the ignorance of others and please don’t condone stupidity in yourself or others. Know when information is being used to distract you or detract from the truth. Leverage this information age to serve your growth, goals and purpose by being open minded to only the right information.

Thanks for reading and sharing my post. See you next week.