In a world of high-intensity information barrage, the late author David Foster Wallace once said something simple yet valuable. I want to share this with you today.
I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important. My job is to make some sense of it.
Like Wallace, we are all rained upon by a continuous deluge of data that comes from both the physical and digital worlds. It can be overwhelming, but it’s also ridiculous considering that we sometimes feel creatively blocked, like we have nothing to say or that the words just won’t come out the right way. We say that we have no inspiration, no ideas, and we can’t get motivated to get to work. We go to bed at night dreaming of great things which we haven’t started yet because we’re missing… something.
Wallace’s perspective clarifies the problem. There’s a lot of information in the world but how do you learn how to recognize the really good stuff?
Is there gold – or usable creative material – in anything and everything? Often, there is. However, sometimes the gold is hidden or in such tiny doses that it’s easy to miss.
Gold prospectors, in the days before machines and processes for extracting gold, would find a promising spot on a stream or river and then use a pan to scoop soil from it. Then they’d dump the pan’s contents onto a screen or filter and try to find gold by separating the sand from the rocks… and hopefully find gold nuggets within. Lacking the screen or filter, they’d just have to sort through the contents of the pan with their fingers and hope they found something valuable.
Generating ideas and creating content is like prospecting for gold, isn’t it?
There’s one key difference, one that makes a huge difference, between prospecting for gold and looking for good creative ideas and material. When prospecting for gold, you’re looking for that one thing, fully formed with certain characteristics like shape, size, color, and heft.
When looking for ideas, you’re looking for the unexpected. You’re trying to find new stuff, stuff you haven’t seen before. You’re searching for patterns and collisions of ideas that combine in new and unique ways. You have a vague sense of what you’d like to find, but you don’t really know what it will look like.
You might go panning for creative gold, but instead you might find the equivalent of silver, iron, or diamonds. Or a chocolate bar wrapper and an empty peanut butter jar with a bullet hole through it. Or two different characters for a novel. Or an old rubber boot with a 300 hundred year old fish living inside of it.
How do we get better at finding information, out of half a million pieces per day, and combining it to good use? Maybe we need to get better at looking for both the obvious and the hidden. Perhaps we need to combine things together more often, especially those things that seem like paradoxes or things that would just never happen. Who knows, maybe there are neighborhoods were everyone isn’t left handed? Maybe there’s a common ritual in your area that would seem innovative and clever elsewhere. Maybe you use Twitter with your toes or your nose? Who knows?
Just think: maybe you are missing twenty five pieces of brilliance per day just because you aren’t looking for them: you’re trying to find something else instead. Maybe you are finding idea diamonds in your mental pan and you are throwing them away without understanding what you are tossing out.
What can you do differently to find the treasures in front of your eyes? Are you looking widely enough?
EDIT: this post has been revised on December 14, 2011
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I absolutely loved the post. In all that information is so much value, just waiting to be recognised. And we all have our own unique way of filtering, combining and searching for patterns.
Thank you, Annemieke! There’s never really an information famine, is there?
No indeed, there is so much. But I guess the challenge is how to make sense of it all.
Thanks by the way, for leading my interest to the writer David Foster Wallace. Some time ago someone advised a book from him, but in our library I could find nothing. I kind of forgot about it until now, so I searched to find out some more about him.
Among other information I found a video interview with him and was really fascinated by the depth of his insights, his genuine appearance and strong self consciousness.
I found a line from him somewhere that said ‘true freedom means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience”, which I think is really fantastic!
Yes, I need to read more Wallace as well.
It’s very sad how he died the way he did at a relatively young age. A bundle of contradictions.
The Dawson quote reminds me of what sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon said, “90% of everything is crud.” It may be a question of ratios: while there is more information that isn’t useful, there is also more that is good.
When we have a problem, maybe it’s that we are too focused on one thing or theme and filter out anything that does not directly relate when often the ideas come from seeing something completely unrelated. It’s one of the things I wonder about with algorithms filtering search results or “top stories” etc. based on likes. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m looking for until I see it.
The brain is a pretty good filter on its own. It’s assaulted with stimuli all day long yet we only notice, consciously, certain things.
Unless looking for something very specific (like the author name of a certain book), I think it’s worthwhile to just scan what’s before you and let the brain decide what catches its interest. It’s a bit like a mall. You don’t know what you want so you stroll through, glance at this and that, window shopping, sometimes stopping to check something else. In the end, you find yourself saying something like, “You know what really want? I’m going back and getting those shoes I saw at …” And so on.
Serendipity vs. intention?
“David Foster Wallace once said”
Really? What is the source? I don’t see a source in DFW’s writings or speeches or from anyone who knew him. It’s just another one of those internet-created fake quotes as far as I can see. It was perhaps even made up after he died, since the quote only starts appearing in Google Blog search in posts done after October 2008, soon after he died.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any other source for this apart from what I was able to Google.
In a generation where information technology is like a blanket it is indeed very hard to process the relevant information. We are just human beings and we only choose to see what we want to see in times of need. However, if one has time then that is when he can ponder and appreciate the things that are unappreciated, do you agree?
Thanks!
Farrah
Farrah recently posted..Brainwave Entrainment
There are a lot of stimuli out there so it’s kind of hard to sort things out so the brain stores all information but only a percentage of that can be used consciously. What do you think is the best strategy to be able to use a large part of the chunk?
Very informative post!
-Vera
Vera G. recently posted..How To Get A Girlfriend
This is such a brilliant article. It is wonderfully written. We are surrounded with treasures. We just need to look properly.
Thanks for sharing.
-Jacob
Jacob Nemesis recently posted..How To Attract Women