They say that knowledge is power but at what point have you had enough? The average person today is presented with more information in one day than a person in the middle-ages got in their entire life. Stop reading for a minute and think about the impact of that last statement. No, really think about it for a minute......
Throughout my life I've always had people ask me, "How do you know that?" usually after I've passed on some obscure information to a random question they asked not expecting a response. I credit it to an insatiable appetite to learn. Now that will seem funny coming from a guy that got kicked out of high school and ended up with a GED 4 years after he should have graduated but my problem was never learning it was the style of teaching that caused me problems. Take a group of people and teach them all at the lowest common denominator (no student left behind) and you're bound to have problems with the smarter kids getting bored and eventually getting into trouble. This was one of the major reasons we chose to home-school our daughter, but that's a subject for another post.
I learn by reading, reading, reading, reading, along with a ton of hands on experience. I don't do anything half-way, I go into it full bore. Now finishing it is another story. Once I've learned how to do it, I have a bad habit of not finishing the project but that's something that I'm working on overcoming.
I read about chickens for over a year online. How to hatch them, how to raise them, what then need for food, what they need for nesting and shelter, etc. Then I went and bought a few chicks, build them a coop and within a month from this post we should be getting eggs. How did I know what to do? I read it online in blogs, forums, personal pages, etc. Learn from others mistakes.
But the subject for this post came as I was setting up the daily reading list for the sidebar on this blog. There are blogs I read daily and some I read offline using my nook and calibre to download and format the feeds into an ebook. (Another post I need to write) The problem is that very list of blogs. You come here to read my posts because you hope to glean some info from it that you can apply to your daily lives. (or you just find my style of writing entertaining) then you figure "I like the things he does so I should check out the blogs he reads" and it begins. I went to each blog I read and realized they had another 10~20 blogs listed that they read. I open them and they have their lists, and so on, and so on. Yes you'll find some crossover the further you get into niche' areas but at what point is it enough?
Based on what I found over the last hour, I could easily have a list of hundreds if not thousands of blogs to read but there is only so much time in the day and most people need to get at least a few hours sleep at night. My quest for information to have myself prepared when we get ourselves out in the country could be what keeps us from getting there. What I need to do is go over all the blogs I read and find a way of tracking just hoe much info I really get from them and start to trim the fat. If I start reading another blog, I need to find one that is giving less info and drop it.
Now there are exceptions. If I find a new blog that only posts once a week but has great info then I don't need to get rid of a daily reader but find a day when I have less to do in the real world to be able to read it. But again in moderation. Having 100 blogs that post once a week still adds to each day.
Why did I write all this? if for no other reason than to get myself back to the real world and offline a bit more. Yes having internet access is one of our main priorities when we make it into the country. The information resource is too big of an asset to lose but like everything else it needs to be taken in moderation.
No comments:
Post a Comment