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What Really Counts

Posted by Joseph Riggio on Monday, August 21, 2006

Learning to what to count on ... including yourself ... may be what makes all the difference in how successful you are - in business, in relationships ... in life - or not!

Howdy all,

I thought about calling this particular post ... What Can We Really Count On? ... but, I decided to move attentionally in a slightly different direction.

The basis of millions, or even billions, of dollars of loss (or gain) begins with our ability to make good decisions, or our lack of that ability.

Let me begin with sharing what I think will prove to be a powerful reference:

  • Reuters' Photo Fraud

    • What you'll find when you view this link will be a short video showing some "photo manipulation" perpetrated by a photo-journalist from Reuters, as well as other news agencies, including the NY Times. To be fair you want to know the source of this video: Aish HaTorah, a non-profit, apolitical network of Jewish educational centers (according to their website aish.com). By no means do I think that this source is unbiased, yet that doesn't automatically discount the information they present in this video ... I think you'll find it well worth a look ...

    Two things continue to amaze to me:

  • 1) The willingness of the mass media newsmakers, including the journalistic teams that work for them, to manipulate the "NEWS" and present their stories as unbiased and comprehensive
  • 2) The willingness of the consumers of "NEWS" to accept what the mass media newsmakers present as the unbiased and comprehensive "truth" of the story

    • What allows the horrendous manipulation of the news includes our desire to "believe" and more significantly our desire to "believe we're in the know" ... we want to believe that we have the pertinent information that will allow us to understand our world, and that subsequently informs both our personal and our social decisions.

    The real challenge - beyond getting better information sources - will be developing the ability to think and respond not just differently in relation to the information we have, but better as well.

    I think there are at least three significant aspects to this ability to "think and respond better":

  • Improving our information gathering capabilities
  • Improving our ability of making sense of the information
  • Improving our decision-making skills - including acting on the decisions we make

    • [For a graphic representation of a relational decision-making process see Decision-Making 101.]

    Let me offer an example that seems to me to be very "real-world" today. One of the basic considerations I make about how we shape our realities has to do with the input mechanism at the entry point to our decision-making process. Simply put:

    "What we allow into our minds to be processed will largely determine what the output of that processing will ultimately be."

    Take for example what we have been doing with our considerations around "TERRORISM" - we are building "terror" and "fear" into our psychic awareness as the basis of how we perceive the world around us. The U.S. has been told that, "the terrorists are coming", not that they might. The country waits on the edge of this "knowledge" in "terror" and "fear" of this impending event.

    In addition to setting up the conditions that cause terror and fear, this ongoing way of thinking about the world sets up the conditions to shape our behaviors as we see happening every day. The willingness, even begrudging willingness, to stand for hours in security lines at the airports around the U.S. - and much of Europe as well - has been shaped by the feeding out of the information we receive almost daily about "The War On Terror."

    Our attitudes and willingness to act in the ways we do depends on our belief that the information we have reflects the actual conditions that exist. This information primes the decision-making system and the thinking and subsequent responses that follow.

    Control the flow of information and/or the way it will be processed and you control the response the information creates.

    This idea forms the basis for all propaganda as well as persuasion. The intention or application doesn't matter ... shaping public opinion, winning a political campaign, marketing a product or service, sales, negotiation, building relationships ... our ability to uncover the information in the system, make sense of it and then decide in relation to the information present determines the outcomes we produce - or not.

    When the information we receive and accept as true has been manipulated to reflect something other than the extant situation if we act on that information our outcomes will suffer.

    While we cannot necessarily control all of our information inputs, we can learn to extract higher quality information from the available sources and then learn to use that information more effectively as well - radically improving the quality of our output.

    We can learn to count on our ourselves ... doing this may be the beginning of all true success.

    Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
    Princeton, NJ

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    (3) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

    Joseph, this series of blogs on “social” or “news” awareness, on the part of us as readers and viewers, I find very inspiring. And here is a question: when I am considering the quality of information that reaches me, and how to sort through it, I easily tend to form conspiracy theories about the media as allies of big businesses and governments. Then I feel like a puppet manipulated for the sake of big business interests and then the anger and/or fear that you mention becomes part of my world and outlook. If I dismiss the information and switch off from news, then I feel like a woman living within pink bubble gum, whose sunbathing is pestered by the world’s torments… so to speak! How can I accomodate looking for high quality news information without being overly defensive or suspicious about everything and everyone in the newsworld? Agnes

    Agnes Mariakaki on Tuesday, August 22, 2006

    Agnes,

    Thanks for the comment and question.

    I will continue exploring this idea in this week’s blog posts, however let me see if I can at least offer a quick comment here as well.

    The critical information would be this: Nothing “is” real until we agree to make it so. Now this might seem confusing until we both agree to accept that information/data “is” just that information/data - until we make it into something else.

    Specifically, I mean that information/data starts off as sensory input of some kind ... AND JUST THAT ... only sensory input. It becomes more than sensory input when we apply it to our thinking about something, what philosophers call intentionality. This making the information/data about something, makes the information/data “intentional” - now it means something to us, and in turn becomes important to us as well.

    Let me give you an example:

    12ef4k4rkfkth88s 3lle - hhess223 ht t8sh

    What does that mean to you? I know you can see it on the screen (or at least I assume you can if you’re reading this). I know you can even read it - you could for instance read this list of data to me over the phone, couldn’t you? You may even be able to find a pattern in the data (let me know if you do). Yet, does it have any meaning to you?

    All the information that exists in the environment starts out just like the string of letters and numbers above - just information/data or if you’d prefer sensory stimulus. Then we relate to the information/data intentionally, making it “mean” something to/for us. The key would be remembering that that the step between perception of the information/data and the making it intentional we can and ultimately do control.

    The information will always be “out there” - what you’ll do in response to it will always be “in here” - and up to you to decide about ... so the “trick” to all of this would be learning how-to decide well ... beyond the “pink bubble-gum” bubble.

    Thanks,

    Joseph

    Joseph Riggio on Tuesday, August 22, 2006

    Thank you, this is very clear and helpful.

    So, it all goes back to intentional living, intentional decision making… great stuff!
    Agnes

    Agnes Mariakaki on Wednesday, August 23, 2006

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