Geography of the Mind

Navigating a toxic culture...

We live in a time with so much information bombarding the wired and wireless world, the old and new media, online and offline life, that if we are not discriminating and filter a lot of it out we become overloaded. So much of it is like zany Morning Zoo radio that our minds drive time in the wrong direction, on roads that either lead us endlessly to nowhere or to dead ends. It is up to us to distinguish what we are exposed to, distilling the stream of data flowing in, to avoid pollution of our intellect.

This can be difficult to do but critical since more than we cognizantly recognize, our everyday lives are affected by what we see and hear, consciously or not. It has the ability to affect our judgment and perceptions more than we realize. There is a menu of junk for the brain readily available that damages our mind just as much as fast food does our body. Much like surface-radiation inversion creates a bad air quality cloud over an urban area, too much mix of poisonous information creates a low quality cloud over our critical thinking.

Some of this can be hard to turn off but an effort to do so is not as hard as it seems. There's a barrage of messages, sales pitches, broadcasts, banners, announcements, links, friend requests and spam to fend off. The first place to start is television and radio, few original ideas come out of them and they're mouthpieces for their sponsors, noise is not news. My choice is not to watch it at all. The web is both wonderfully full of information but a lot of it is disorganized and useless. Because most of our media and communications have moved onto the internet, it is not as easy as turning off the television or radio, since it also contains a lot of useful and valuable information. This requires choosing careful discrimination on what sites to go to and how much time we spend on them to avoid saturation.

Another source of information blast is not so easy to quiet and that is people. We may be exposed to cynical contrary people we can't avoid in our work, family and in public. We can choose our friends and who we associate with by choice. Avoid negative people and don't listen to constant whining and failures. Anyone who is involved in too much excess or extreme at anything, constantly complaining, never resolves their own problems, stay away from them. The chances they're going to change are highly unlikely. With inescapable people at work and family members this requires developing a mechanism to tune the discord out, a difficult but not insurmountable task. There are ways to mute their dissonance both by your approach and response to them but it requires some trial and error effort.

The more distilling down of the babble of information streaming at us from multiple channels we do, we discover that day to day life becomes more harmonious and less disquieting. Cleaning out the clutter of the clatter and chattering blows the bad air out and improves our field of vision. The knowledge we intake is of better quality and allows us to breathe clearer air and think with more clarity and calms the mind and soul.

Quality

It's not what you do but how you do it...

It's peculiar to me how many people place classification judgments on individuals and their abilities, intelligence, vocabulary, education, opinions and perceptions by the particular work title they have, rather than their actual aptitude. Some medical doctors can be quite boorish and clumsy at figuring out a patient's problem while a good mechanic can finesse a difficult car problem far better than that doctor. Some lawyers can shine a beam of light on a topic like no one else, while a mortgage broker might befuddle you on the same simplest topic in twenty minutes.  A smart manager leads their people to making their own decisions for everyone to succeed while a dictatorial floor supervisor intimidates the group into fearing for their jobs, making everyone unhappy and less productive. The lady at the front desk knows more about the locality than the professional tour guide and imparts it better. A know-it-all service rep can terrorize your service problem in an hour, while a good technical support trouble shooter can sectionalize, isolate and resolve a problem in minutes.

In my thinking our judgments about other people should have less to do with which college they went to or if they didn't go to at all, if they're a professional or a tradesman, an executive or an hourly wage earner and more about the quality of their competency and ability to communicate well. Whether a company vice president or laundry manager, the assessment should be on competency in how much knowledge and skill they have in their basic duties, how well they have priorities figured out, their ability to reason and deal with complications and how they interact with other people, both their peers and customers, in resolving them. Quality interaction is now a required component of any working environment and it's appropriate to make an appraisal of someone's skill at it on any level . Communicating well is of absolute importance since it involves listening to what someone is telling you, interpreting it correctly and what they really mean and being able to communicate back by reducing a complex issue to a simple explanation.