Information Equity: What It Is and What It's Costing You

One of the biggest misconceptions in our age of technology is that the information is free. Information is actually one of the expensive things in the world and no matter how much money you have you'll never be able to afford as much as you need.

If you do not already guessed, the cost of information consumption of time and mental energy. Our two most limited resources, which are almost always better spent on things that really matter in life, relationships, health and fulfillment operation. Consumption information is also terribly inefficient use of resources due to the limited short-term memory of people we have, the vast majority of this information just gets absorbed into our subconscious, to reemerge blurred and bent by our emotions at the moment.

I'd even go so far as to say that the past generation was better, because the information is much more tangible costs, $ 300 encyclopedia volumes that were the whole shelf in the living room, 10 LB Yellow Pages, hundreds of documents in complicated filing system. trouble getting information from these types of media meant that he made ​​sure it was going to be worth your time.

Let's get practical here:

As a web developer and marketing consultant I make about $ 50/hourly (Even if I account for income continuity of my domain investing and affiliate marketing business)

For example, since I'm fast that takes me 15 minutes to turn a decent blog and watch YouTube videos on the topic (and remember the 80/20 principal, I probably need to see more of it to learn what I need)

This a finite time-cost to me at least $ 12.50

I'm going to have to work overtime to cover the time spent receiving information, so that cost me another 15 minutes to be spent enjoying the life we work so damn hard for

Like you I only have about 8 hours of productive mental energy on the day. Let's Active, the applicable data consumption is at least twice a mental energy to work (and sometimes it is much large gap, depending on what you do ).

those 15 minutes cost me 30 minutes of mental energy, 30 minutes, which was stolen from the energy that could have been devoted to actual work. It is a total of 1 / 8 of my mental energy production for the day!

Note that this example is only 15 minutes of consumption of information, sometimes you spend hours a day!

if I'm going to treat my time as money and my knowledge as a potential power, it becomes clear that I need to be getting capital above and beyond the value of knowledge I am getting to cover the high costs of acquiring it. Whenever I participate in the information consumption is putting himself in position information inequality .

We live in interesting times where there is this massive difference between the amount of information we consume and the amount of time we have to do it. I'd even go so far as to say our success, individually and culturally in the next century will be decided no amount of knowledge we have gained, but our ability to affect the value of it.

for tips and methods for increasing the share of information, visit