The Economist wrote,
"The World's Most Powerful Resource is no longer oil, but DATA created by 4 billion smartphone users in the world. 3.2 billion internet users even without us knowing fully when we're sitting in traffic, when we're watching Netflix, when we're on the move, every physical activities creates a digital footprints."
It's incredible that in 2018 we'll create more data than we have in the last 5000 years.
E.O. Wilson said that,
" We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom."
We have big data, but little intuition, we have more choices but less decision making skills, and therefore if the greatest resource is data, the greatest skills is focus and attention.
About 30 years ago the culture critic Neil Postman wrote a book called Amusing ourselves to Death
he said,
"Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley believed we would become a trivial culture."
Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us, Huxley believed we'd be drowning in a sea of irrelevance.
As Susan Etlinger said in her Ted's talk,
"It's a choice between Big Brother watching you and you watching Big Brother."
But it doesn't have to be that way at all, we're not passive consumers of data just taking it all in and drowning in it, we're actually able to shape it and make sense of it. If we're able to pay attention to how we think, as much as we do to how we code. To do that we need to be able to practice meditation and mindfulness, that ability to curate, to filter, to view through a certain lens so that we have more perspective. So that we could be in the present moment without judgement. For some people meditation is movement, it's swimming, for some people it's running, for some people it's playing their instruments, for some people it's being able to be in a place and completely merge into an understanding of oneself awareness.
Mindfulness has been shown to help people examine and quantify their priorities, his heightened understanding of ourselves allows us to see which trade offs matters and what is most important to us.
By standing on a metaphorical balcony looking down that is distancing ourselves from our thoughts and emotions, we're able to better find clarity. That bird's eye view, that over big picture perspective allow us to formulate better decisions from insights. Meditation is the dynamic process of examining the flow of life , right here and now, and as David Lynch says,
"Meditation makes you more and more you."
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