Congratulations on getting this far in the book. You are undoubtedly better equipped, not just to deal effectively with the world of massive overload that we live in, but to thrive on it.

By the accident of when you and I were born we can consider ourselves to be either blessed (my belief) or cursed to live in a world of boundless information. If we were not connected to the world’s information, then we couldn’t learn from and build on the extraordinary progress, ideas, and insights of innovators everywhere. As it is, every one of us can access a scope of resources absolutely unimaginable a scant few years ago.

This is a remarkable opportunity. Yet the privilege of this superabundance has marked downsides. It comes inextricably tied to the need to sift through the prodigious plenty to find what is relevant, useful, and adds value to our lives. The degree to which information overload is an opportunity or problem is largely up to you and how you approach it.

Whether you prosper or are overwhelmed in our world of excess is, more than anything, a choice.

Choosing to prosper is, in truth, not an easy path. You need to develop and apply the skills and practices outlined in this book, making them part of your daily activities. Where this challenge comes into perspective is in comparison with what might seem like the easy way, the path of least resistance, of letting today’s flood of information simply wash over you, taking in whatever snags your attention in the endless stream, a victim to information predators.

In the 2020s and beyond, if you have any ambition or purpose, your success will undoubtedly stem from a superior ability to generate value, insight, and better decisions from unlimited information. Today those achieving exceptional results are—consciously or unconsciously—consistently developing these foundational life skills.

Integrating the Powers

The five powers described in this book are not separate and distinct; they are different facets of a whole: your ability to thrive on overload. This is of course not just about goal achievement or success. It is, ultimately, at least as much about reaching balance, health, and happiness in a frantic world. Overload does not necessarily lead to a feeling of being overwhelmed, but if it does, by its very nature it destroys well-being and the ability to function effectively. Taken together, developing the five powers can move you beyond today’s severe challenges to give you a strong feeling of control of your life.

Understanding your purpose for engaging with information has to sit at the center of your abilities, relating to and informing how you develop and apply the other powers. Framing sets the foundations for synthesis and provides the reference point for your filtering. Filtering the signal from the noise is necessarily a central activity and is one of the frames for attention. Being conscious in how we allocate our attention is at the heart of self-determination in a world designed to distract you. Synthesis pulls together all the other elements to generate what has true value: understanding, insight, and better decisions.

Each power has immense value, but it is in the whole of how they come together that the true potential lies: making your capabilities a match to the extraordinary world in which we live. You need to integrate the powers and their underlying actions and attitudes into who you are and how you behave.

Steps Toward Thriving

Reading this book alone will not lead to excellence. You need to put the ideas into practice, to change what you do day by day based on what you have learned.

The exercises at the end of each chapter are designed to help you establish your own personal plan and odyssey for thriving on overload. If you didn’t do them as you read the book, I strongly encourage you to go back to complete the exercises, or at least the ones you think will be most useful. You might wish to write the responses in your own notebooks or online documents rather than in this book so they are easy to refer to without carrying the book around, and allowing you to lend the book to a friend as well!

Downloadable copies of the exercises and an in-depth online course are available at the book website, thrivingonoverload.com. Also look through the Resources for Thriving following this chapter. I point to a range of wonderful books that go deeper into some of the important ideas introduced in this book.

Opportunities for the Future of Overload

The entire history of humanity built up to the recent inflection point of complete information immersion. Where will we go from here? I offer a very safe prediction:

Information overload will inexorably increase through this decade and beyond.

Excessive information is already a defining aspect of our lives and times, but this is just the beginning. Part of the cause lies simply in the continuing acceleration of connectivity and data creation. The more important reason is that humans by their very nature have an insatiable appetite for information. We will never transcend that; we will always want more. The economy has already transitioned from the tangible to the intangible. That shift will inevitably continue as value and work migrate to information-based industries.

This leads to deep challenges as well as opportunities. More information alone is not the biggest problem we face. There are incredibly high incentives to design information that influences us to support others’ agendas, not our own best interests. Moreover, AI’s growing capacity to manipulate, fed by an avalanche of personal data including how we touch screens, voice stress patterns, and facial emotional cues, is deeply alarming.

These issues lie at the center of our lives and of society at large. We need to carefully consider the implications, and how we can make the best of this state of affairs.

Better Tools

In mid-1998 the most used web search engines included the likes of Yahoo, AltaVista, LookSmart, and Excite. They showed results that were primarily based on the frequency of search terms on the web page, so it was very easy for internet entrepreneurs to engage in “keyword stuffing” to rank well, and hard for users to find the most relevant results for their queries.

Then Google launched in September 1998, with “Beta” boldly stamped on the website to indicate it was not yet a finished product. The founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, had invented a metric to indicate the likelihood a given web page would be relevant and useful to the searcher. Within five years it became the most used search engine in the United States.²

Problems are the spark for invention. It is safe to say that we have a deep problem in our ability to find the most relevant information and avoid irrelevant or misleading content. We need better tools than we have today.

Part of the reason has been in the creative destruction that has been emblematic of the internet economy, leading to the untimely death of useful platforms such as Delicious and FriendFeed. The rapidly mutating economics of the news industry has also played a role, with a proliferation of aspirant news aggregators, each jostling for a share of advertising revenue, perverting many efforts. The potential value of personalized newsfeeds has been undermined by (usually merited) distrust of the companies that apply behavioral data to peddling advertisements rather than creating value for their users.

There remains a massive opportunity to provide better services to help us filter and find what is most useful to us. It is highly encouraging to see the increasing pool of talent, inspiration, and capital being dedicated to help us discover the most useful information and distinguish between information that is correct, questionable, or plain wrong. I hold strong hopes that in the current mix of contenders in this space some truly valuable services will emerge and prosper.

The Risks of Polarization

In my work as a futurist I must, unfortunately, consistently point to the deep forces driving polarization across societies on a multitude of dimensions, including most evidently income, politics, healthcare, values, wealth, power, openness, and privacy. While the “digital divide” that leaves behind those with inadequate access to information remains critical, the primary danger has shifted to the divergence in our behaviors.

The central thesis of this book is that we have a choice on whether we thrive or are overwhelmed in a world of information excess. As some people take the option of thriving while others follow the path of least resistance, this will aggravate polarization across society, as some become finely adapted to the drivers of success in our emerging world, and others become cannon fodder for the information wars.

“Information abundance, like all markets of abundance, is bad for the average person but great for a small number of people,” observes writer David Perell. “The best metaphor is health, where obesity rates and the number of people in incredible shape are both rising,” he notes.³

Improved tools and reduced predatory behavior by information purveyors, be it through social pressure or regulation, will certainly help. However, the most important issue is empowering as many people as possible with the skills that give them choices. We need better information education.

Information Skills on the Curriculum

Throughout the 25 years that I have focused on developing individual information skills, I have been amazed at the incredible paucity of explicit information skills programs, be they at schools or universities, or even in companies where the productivity and effectiveness of their staff depends more than anything on their ability to deal well with information. There are a few programs here and there, but these are almost oddities rather than at the core of skill development, as they should be in the world in which we live.

The first step is simply acknowledging that information capabilities are fundamental to everything we do, our ability to succeed in almost every aspect of our work and many facets of our lives. Stemming from that recognition, educators and leaders must prioritize and architect the programs and working environments that will enhance those skills. The fact is that the most successful people are those who have taught themselves to be effective at making the most of information excess. Yet usually even they, not to mention others, can benefit from explicitly focusing on enhancing their information habits and routines.

Cognitive Evolution

In just longer than a blink of an eye the internet and smartphone have moved to the center of our everyday lives. This has led numerous thinkers and authors, notably Nicholas Carr, Susan Greenfield, and Jason Lanier, to stridently criticize our contemporary use of technology.

“The human brain adapts to the environment and the environment is changing in an unprecedented way, so the brain may also be changing in an unprecedented way,” says Greenfield.⁴ To my mind this is a truism. It is starkly evident that our highly flexible and neuroplastic minds are incredibly responsive to their environment. There is no question that our brains are evolving in a fast-changing world. Those of adults are changing in response to different stimuli, and children’s brains today are developing in different ways than those who were young just a decade or two earlier.

There are, of course, real dangers from this. Greenfield’s polemic Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains likens the impact of digital technologies on the brain to climate change.⁵ As critics of the book have pointed out, the evidence supporting many of her claims is sparse or contradictory,⁶ but she is right to point to the possibility of negative effects and the need for greater research on these. The potential (though not confirmed) impacts she references include reduced attention spans, interpersonal skills, and ability to build deep knowledge.

Yet there is no change that is all good or all bad. On the face of it, if our minds are evolving in response to their changing environment, they are likely to be better suited to it. Minds that were best adapted to the world of the 1970s, for example, would likely not perform as well today. Yet some who were embarking on their working careers then are doing exceptionally well today, having adeptly adjusted to the very different environment they live in today.

As with all technology-driven change, we need to be keenly aware of the possible downsides and finely attuned to the positive potential. There are two major opportunities from living in unprecedented information immersion.

The first opportunity is the ability to judiciously implement “cognitive offloading” by transferring mental tasks to technology.

To take an obvious example, we long ago started using calculators for everyday arithmetic. At the time many claimed we would lose our ability to perform simple math. A more pertinent question is why we should spend our time doing math when our brains are capable of so much more interesting tasks. The concern would be justified if degraded mental math skills impacted other cognitive faculties. In fact, a meta-analysis of 42 studies on the use of calculators in middle and high school through college mathematics courses has found that use of calculators improves conceptual capabilities and mathematical achievement.⁷ We can now offload to technology far more complex cognitive tasks, from recognizing cancerous cells in x-ray images to deciding whether an email is likely to be important to us.

We are on the threshold of a new phase in which decisions are offloaded to machines, raising a welter of practical and ethical issues. There are some decisions that we can, with sufficient oversight, simply delegate to AI. However, for many important decisions we will need to bring together the best of natural and artificial intelligence into systems that can outperform each applied alone. Those who become better “cyborgs” by intelligently complementing their higher-order abilities with the rapidly advancing capabilities of machines will forge ahead.

Considering cognitive offloading purely from an information- processing perspective, we can and should expect technologies (sometimes with humans in the loop) to become far better than they are today at services such as identifying content that interests you, assessing the veracity of facts and articles, or even providing pointed counterarguments to your investment theses.

The second and bigger opportunity is to consciously and positively guide your personal cognitive evolution.

Your brain will inevitably evolve. In 10 years from now it will be significantly different. It will have changed in response to the likely expansion of your information immersion, and more importantly, how you choose to respond to that environment, including your daily information habits. Adopting effective behaviors will lead your brain to develop to better suit a world of abundance. If you enact the suggestions offered in this book, especially those in Chapter 4 on attention, you will be assisting your neurology to adapt successfully.

The relatively new science of epigenetics has uncovered that our genes are expressed differently depending on our environment and behavior.⁸ In other words, how you respond to information excess will change who you are. If your behaviors suit your evolving environment, you will become better adapted. Studies of transgenerational epigenetics show that these changes can be passed down to your offspring.⁹ Your personal evolution can directly benefit your children.

Thriving Today and Tomorrow

Information excess is a defining attribute of our times. Personally, I am overjoyed to have virtually unlimited information access, compared to the alternative of information being restricted or difficult to access. This is an incredible boon to us all. The gift just comes bundled with the challenge of dealing with the associated excess, exacerbated by the unfortunate way our information economy has developed to focus on exploiting our attention rather than serving us.

We can all learn to maximize the potential and minimize the negative from this reality. Those who do that best will succeed, not just for themselves, but in all their endeavors, which for some include saving humanity from itself.

Humans by their intrinsic nature will always seek to learn, to grow, to invent, to progress. Faster flows of information accelerate that process. The more we share, the more we can become. It is up to each of us to make the most of the incredible abundance and potential of the information resources we have. The answer is to get better at this, not to limit the pace of development of what author Ramez Naam calls “the infinite resource”: ideas.¹⁰

Network society thinker and educator Clay Shirky concurs. “I’m just so impatient with the argument that the world should be slowed down to help people who aren’t smart enough to understand what’s going on,” he says.¹¹

Having read this book, you are now better equipped to thrive on information abundance and make the most of the extraordinary times we live in, defined by acceleration and exponential growth. Over to you. You are the one who will make the choices, do the work, and develop the capabilities required to thrive in these intensely exciting times of boundless opportunity.

Keep in Touch!

Thank you so much for staying the course through this book! My dearest hope is that it has proved valuable to you. It is of course up to you to apply what I have offered to make it useful. My job has been to provide you with as useful tools, approaches, and perspectives as I possibly can.

My intention was to keep this book compact and easy to digest, despite the vast scope of the topic. If you wish to go beyond what I’ve been able to pack into this book, my team and I have compiled a wealth of resources to assist you on the book website. It contains:

•   All the exercises from this book for you to download and print.

•   Every one of the interviews I did for this book in my podcast Thriving on Overload, packed with incredible insights (far more than I could include in this book!) from the likes of author Nir Eyal, publisher Tim O’Reilly, futurist Cathy Hackl, venture capitalist Gary Swart, technology columnist Christopher Mims, and dozens of other highly inspiring guests.

•   A highly interactive online course that guides you through creating a detailed Personal Information Plan to help you thrive.

•   Frameworks, tools, productivity hacks, reviews of software tools, and other useful content.

•   Links to the online Thriving on Overload communities where you can learn from others who share their insights and tips on how to thrive on overload, and where I hang out (say hi!).

Simply go to thrivingonoverload.com.

EXERCISES

Your Action Plan

In summary, what actions will you take to enable you to thrive on overload?