Some information is more important than other information, but there's no such thing as useless knowledge. No matter how obscure a piece of knowledge may be, it's still useful.
REFERENCE POINTS FOR THE MIND
When we encounter a new situation, our mind tries to grapple with it and understand it by making connections with things we know already. The more we know, the more room there is for analogies, the more things to make connections with, the more complicated and beautiful the patterns our subconscious mind can find.
ALL KNOWLEDGE IS MADE UP OF TRIVIA
However important or critical some knowledge may seem, it can be decomposed into lots of trivia. In order to learn a language, you must learn a staggering amount of trivia. Each individual vocabulary word is trivia. For me, knowing the word for "yarn" in Japanese, is trivia. And yet, take a lot of that trivia and put it together, and you end up with language. A trip across the world is trivia. Sure, you may spend a month in the wilds of Africa, but each individual moment is taken up with walking, eating, sleeping, looking, or other trivial easy actions.
Everything on a computer is 1's and 0's. The world's greatest art, movies, and photography can be stored in this format. When I store the Mona Lisa on my computer as a 5 megabyte image file, what's the value of the 9000th bit, is it 0 or 1? That's absolute trivia, and yet it comes together to make a beautiful painting.
ALL KNOWLEDGE IS PROFOUND
If all knowledge is trivial, then it works the other way, and all knowledge is profound. To a baby, everything is fresh and new. Why should that change as we grow up? Take a moment and look around the world and try to see things like you've never seen them before. You control your mind, so you can make yourself ponder, what are the objects on your desk, what purpose do they serve, how did they get there? This is the key to humor, the key to inner joy, the key to enlightenment.
Here are some other articles I've written. By reading these, you'll gain new reference points which will increase your overall intelligence in dealing even with unrelated new situations.
Autodidact: Be A Self-Teacher
Introduction To Urban Exploration
Is There Randomness In Real Life?
Life Is A Game
How The Mind Learns
REFERENCE POINTS FOR THE MIND
When we encounter a new situation, our mind tries to grapple with it and understand it by making connections with things we know already. The more we know, the more room there is for analogies, the more things to make connections with, the more complicated and beautiful the patterns our subconscious mind can find.
ALL KNOWLEDGE IS MADE UP OF TRIVIA
However important or critical some knowledge may seem, it can be decomposed into lots of trivia. In order to learn a language, you must learn a staggering amount of trivia. Each individual vocabulary word is trivia. For me, knowing the word for "yarn" in Japanese, is trivia. And yet, take a lot of that trivia and put it together, and you end up with language. A trip across the world is trivia. Sure, you may spend a month in the wilds of Africa, but each individual moment is taken up with walking, eating, sleeping, looking, or other trivial easy actions.
Everything on a computer is 1's and 0's. The world's greatest art, movies, and photography can be stored in this format. When I store the Mona Lisa on my computer as a 5 megabyte image file, what's the value of the 9000th bit, is it 0 or 1? That's absolute trivia, and yet it comes together to make a beautiful painting.
ALL KNOWLEDGE IS PROFOUND
If all knowledge is trivial, then it works the other way, and all knowledge is profound. To a baby, everything is fresh and new. Why should that change as we grow up? Take a moment and look around the world and try to see things like you've never seen them before. You control your mind, so you can make yourself ponder, what are the objects on your desk, what purpose do they serve, how did they get there? This is the key to humor, the key to inner joy, the key to enlightenment.
Here are some other articles I've written. By reading these, you'll gain new reference points which will increase your overall intelligence in dealing even with unrelated new situations.
Autodidact: Be A Self-Teacher
Introduction To Urban Exploration
Is There Randomness In Real Life?
Life Is A Game
How The Mind Learns
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