One of the greatest misconceptions in our age of technology is that information is free. Information is actually one of the expensive things in the world and no matter how much money you have you'll never be able to afford as much of it as you need.
If haven't guessed already, the cost of information consumption is time and mental energy. Our two most limited resources, which are almost always better spent on the things that really matter in life; relationships, health and fulfilling work. Information consumption is also a terribly inefficient use of these resources considering the limited short term memory we humans have, the vast majority of this information just gets absorbed into our subconscious, to reemerge blurred and convoluted by our emotions at the moment.
I would even go as far to say that generations past had it better because information had much more tangible costs; a $300 encyclopedia volume that took up an entire shelf in your living room, a 10 LB yellow pages directory, hundreds of documents in a complicated filing system. The trouble of extracting information from these types of media meant that you made sure it was going to be worth your while.
Let's get practical here:
As a web developer & marketing consultant I make about $50/hourly (More if I account for the revenue continuity of my domain investing & affiliate marketing business)
Let's say since I'm fast it takes me 15 minutes to skim a decent blog & watch a YouTube video on a subject (and remember the 80/20 principal, I probably need to skim more than this to learn what I need to)
This has a finite time-cost to me of at least $12.50
I'm going to have to work overtime to cover time spent consuming information so it's cost me another 15 minutes that should be spent enjoying the life I'm working so damn hard for
Like you I only have about 8 hours of productive mental energy a day. Let's say active, applicable information consumption takes at least twice the mental energy of doing work (And sometimes it's a much great gap, depending upon what you do).
Those 15 minutes cost me 30 minutes of mental energy, 30 minutes which was stolen from energy that could have been devoted to actual work. That's a total of 1/8 of my productive mental energy for the day!
Keep in mind this example is for just 15 minutes of information consumption, sometimes you spend hours a day!
if I'm going to treat my time as money and my knowledge as potential power it becomes clear that I need to be getting equity above and beyond the value of the knowledge I am getting to cover the high cost of acquiring it. Whenever I engage in information consumption I am putting myself in a position of information inequity.
We live in an interesting time where there is this massive disparity between the amount of information we can consume and the amount of time we have to do it. I'd even go as far as to say the our success, individually and culturally over the next century will be decided not by the amount of knowledge we acquire but by our ability to leverage the value of it.
For tips and methods for increasing information equity please visit rel=nofollow
http://www.jonathanroseland.com/blog/society-a-philosophy.htmlJonathan Roseland has a full service marketing firm in Denver. Jonathan is passionate about entrepreneurship, history, trans humanism and is also the inventor of the most clever cocktail toast ever.
http://www.JonathanRoseland.com
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http://EzineArticles.com/?Information-Equity:-What-It-Is-and-What-Its-Costing-You&id=5810060] Information Equity: What It Is and What It's Costing You
