A Bucket Full of Info

But all I had room for was an eyedropper’s worth.

Photo by Chris Gallagher on Unsplash

Information is key.

There are so many things you can do when you learn new info. You can grow, change, and make various and sundry new choices.

Can you know too much? No…but…you can be inundated with too much information all at once. That, in turn, can be pretty overwhelming.

Not sure what I mean? Well, let me put it to you this way. Let’s say you have a shot-glass. I go and pour beer into your shot glass. But I don’t stop when I reach the top — I pour out the entire bottle of beer.

First, you have a mess on your hands. There is beer all over the table, and the shot glass is now a total mess.

Second, I just wasted beer (and believe me, if I am sharing my beer with you, it was a good beer).

Third, you, or since I poured all that beer all over the counter, I have to clean this mess up.

Let’s turn this into a metaphor. I tell you something useful. But then I keep talking at you and adding to it and expanding it and giving it more bits and pieces and further data and examples and this, that, the other thing, and…and….

And then I write a run-on sentence. But the point is that you can only absorb so much of this info before I am wasting both our time.

What can you do about this?

Receiving too much information

Like it or not this can be an everyday occurrence. Spend five minutes on Facebook or Twitter and chances are you have gotten too much information of one sort or other.

When you are bombarded by info, even information that you desire to have, you can find yourself curling up in the fetal position with your hands over your ears and whimpering, before long.

But it needn’t be that way. You can pick and choose what to do with the info you receive.

When it comes to the unwanted or just the out-there-but-unnecessary, you can readily disregard it. Or at the very least decide how much of it to take in and what not to. You have the control.