From Data, to Information, to Knowledge, to Action, to Metric, Back to Data

Once I was very fortunate to meet and have a short conversation with Daniel Tammet in Paris.

I remember thinking “this person is a human being, just like me, with extraordinary abilities, but does it make him happier?”.

As I am in the process of reorganizing my thoughts, it led me back to his story, but with a different perspective and a new goal.

Not as much as remembering everything, what is most valuable seems to me to have the ability to articulate one’s thoughts, and most importantly, to turn these ideas into purposeful actions.

The fact is that, like most of my contemporary humans, I have the opportunity, and the addiction to go through a tremendous amount of new information each day. If I want to make a positive contribution to this world, I must not only consume Information but become a processor of information, connect the dots, make sense of it, and turn knowledge into power.

So I’m now in the process of structuring my intellectual activities in a “multi-stream, bi-directional” operation. Or put it simply, to centralise and standardize and structure my data, connect my social media channels and enable two way communication, merge my personal and professional communication while keeping several distinct personas neatly separated by legal and fiscal affiliations. Sounds tedious? Yes. But necessary.

So my goal is now to build a self-reinforcing loop to increase not only my memory retention, but create a solid foundation to articulate my own thinking and develop meaningful activities in the real world. These activities, I want to learn to evaluate their impact, make mistakes and learn: the self-reinforcing loop mentioned above.

Unlike the amazing Daniel Tammet, I cannot fundamentaly alter my biological makeup, but the prospect of organizing my thoughts, having more informed discussions with others makes me very happy right now. More soon…