The curse of knowledge

As my seven year old son would say it, audio books are the
bestest! You can get an education in an arcane topic between exit 4 and exit 15
of the New Jersey Turnpike.

In a recent trip Professor Joshua Kaplan gave me a lecture on Political
Theory. In the first few minutes, he relates a passage from Oedipus the King,
in which a blind prophet, Theresias, reminds the king that “Wisdom is a curse
when wisdom does nothing for the one who has it”.

I’m sure philosophers can find profound meaning in those
words, but for me, a child of the information age, they spoke of the curse of
information overflow, of millions of Google links, hundreds of e-mails,
reports, audio books, videos and junk e-mail folders. They spoke of the difficulty of extracting knowledge from that constant stream of data so that I can use it to serve my clients, improve my business and my life.

Companies spend millions in data mining programs, but whether you have a company with a large budget or a one person business with a tiny budget, the answer is the same and as old as time, just ask why, what, when, who, where and how.

Why you need that information, what is the answer going to do for you, how are you going to use the data. Thus, instead of trying to find a list of all the small business in the east coast of the U.S. you may want to consider why you need such a list, are you trying to sell them something? What are you selling them and how are you going to sell it to them.

The answers to those questions tell us where to search, how long to search and how much time and money should we spend searching. Once we have those answers the information will be easier to find, and you may find that it is already in your own files or even in your junk e-mail folder.

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