“Knowledge is power”, said Sir Francis Bacon, so why is it that so many people read Heat magazine and the Sun? Just two sources of the many 100s that contain zero knowledge, but large amounts of easy to consume gossip, scandal and acres of sports reporting.
Companies pay consultants vast sums to tell them what to think, when they could get most of that knowledge by spending £150 in Amazon, and asking their staff. People don’t know who to vote for, because they only read about the latest murders, stabbings, celeb divorce/drug/wedding/split, sex scandal. They just know politics is boring and that they don’t like the dour Scots guy – hence why politics is ever more about personality and sound bite. Employees repeat the same processes again and again because they don’t read about the latest advances in their field of work, or read about the mistakes made by other people throughout history, so they can avoid them, and so on and so forth.
What if we could get people to consume more improving material, eg real news, political opinion, science, art, education, history, economics, business and management thinking. In other words to use a well worn slogan – “Life Long Learning”.
I subscribe to the theory that by-in-large school and university make learning so boring that the vast majority of people never become enthused about expanding their horizons. Why learn how to manage your finances, when books on investment, economics and banking are so boring they’re never going to compete with the gossip rags. The lazy assumption is that this problem is limited to the working classes, but every city whizz-kid who invested in sub-prime mortgages had obviously never opened any economics history book. However, I’m glad to report we’re beginning to see the green-shoots of change, thanks to the Internet.
If I want to learn about investing, I can watch a video from Warren Buffet, and leave a comment and find out what other people are saying about the video. In other words the average man on the street can gain access to the world’s best thinkers for free and post them a comment on their blog.
We no longer have to passively consume content, we can interact with it, or it can interact with us. This blog is an example, I can share my opinion with a theoretical 4 billion readers, and they can tell me I’m an idiot. Wikipedia is an example, I can quickly find out something on a vast array of subjects, and then follow a bunch of links to get even more content, or I can add a page of my own. This makes learning fun and accessible.
An even more exciting development are sites like TED.com, which I recently discovered, where some of the world’s foremost thinkers have about 20 minutes to put across their ideas. We can all learn something from this wonderful resource, be it presentation style, a useful bit of trivia, or an earth shattering idea.
Once you get people thinking and learning, they hopefully don’t accept the status quo, or they implement something the learned at work, or they share it with the world on a blog.
We just need to get the ball rolling and encourage everyone to stop reading Heat and start learning by demonstrating to them that learning is no longer dry, dusty and dull. To that end, I’ll shortly be creating a Links page, where exceptional TED talks, or excellent articles will be posted.
So my message is simple, consume more wisdom, Sir Francis Bacon would be 
