Page 150 - Rich Dad's Increase Your Financial IQ: Get Smarter with Your Money

Information Overload

So, the good news is that information is abundant and free. The bad news is
that . . . information is abundant and free. The irony of the Information Age
is that there is too much of it. Today, people complain about information

overload. At any given moment a person can be watching television, surfing
the Internet, and talking on the phone—while driving past digital billboards.
In previous ages, no one complained about too much land or oil. Yet in the
Information Age, people complain about having too much information and

being overloaded with the very asset that could make them super-rich.

Military Intelligence

In Vietnam, I learned to respect the power of information. I became acutely
aware of information’s power to kill, as well as to save lives. Using military

intelligence to kill no longer makes sense to me. Today, I prefer to use
information to give life, not take it.
As an information officer I was also faced with information overload.
While at war, the amount of information we had to process was staggering.

Very quickly, we had to learn how to sort, categorize, discard, and process
tremendous amounts of information from multiple and varied sources. If we
didn’t, we or others could die.

Classifying Information

To handle information overload, the military puts a great amount of effort
into classifying information. Without classification, all information is equal
and virtually worthless. As an information officer in Vietnam I learned to
classify information according to a set of characteristics.

1. Time. In war and in business, information can be useful one minute and
obsolete the next. War is fluid, always moving. So is business and investing.

Enemy troops can be one place today and a hundred miles away tomorrow.