Develop Power

A leopard is effectively powerful because it is mysterious. They prefer solitude, signaling less about their intentions, requiring more skill to stalk prey, watch, wait, hide, and time their moves.

Lions, on the other hand hunt in packs, signal their intentions, use brute strength to overcome their prey. A lion’s strength is physics, having more of something is useful, but a human can know more about the lion than the lion knows about a human.

Not so with a leopard.

[Rana, 2019]

Foucault

Michael Foucault, as divisive as he is, is one of the most influential thinkers of the last 50 years. His work includes studying power, “Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.”

Power exists with interaction, in a relationship. Power is knowledge, according to Foucault. With physics alone, a lion wins. With information involved, a human or leopard wins—whoever has the better information.

[Rana, 2019]

Revolution

There have been four revolutions in our species. The first was in our minds, where we developed culture and complex languages. From there, we created the Agricultural Revolution, then the Industrial Revolution. Now, it’s the Information Revolution.

Information is not knowledge. Power from mystery is still available to us.

With the Internet came the democratization of information, the loss of gatekeepers, more noise, more shouting, more ineffective information and confusion of knowledge.

However, knowledge is the ability to think interesting and novel things. It is individuality. We cannot develop knowledge from short-term wins, we must work to know things. We must take action in the world through art, technology, science, or business.

[Rana, 2019]

Einstein

Albert Einstein said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.”

Also, “He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead—his eyes are closed.”

If our eyes are open, the mysterious, the bumping into interesting and novel things and familiarity with an asymmetry of knowledge allows us to perform well in a noisy environment.

[Rana, 2019]

References:

Rana, Z. (2019, November 7). The Greatest Competitive Advantage in a World of Noise. Retrieved November 12, 2019, from Medium website: https://medium.com/personal-growth/the-greatest-competitive-advantage-in-a-world-of-noise-b4ab5622893e