From EXCESS to EXCISE

Continued from last week.

I am up to head in new music.

I am rapidly being overwhelmed !

Soooooo much new sounds ! Sooo much creativity !

I have always been an avid listener to new music. I still buy lots of music (in CD format mind you!)

But I have decided to try a subscription music service for a year.

it is so easy!

You read a magazine. They mention a new recording by a band you do not know. You take a look in your music service et voilà!

You keep on reading and pop another new band!

Et voilà once again.

Your smart phone is now full of new music.

But then…is the fun to get new music

to listen to the stuff?

I am literally up to my ears in new music.

I need to find some way to cut the crap and extract only the music I love and cherish, only the music I will listen to again and again.

I need to filter out the rest.

Infobesity is exactly the same.

There is simply too much information around us all the time. Every waking moment finds you bombarded with tons of new information.

New social networks users go up every day!

Social networks are now present in vast numbers. Facebook and LinkedIn are just the tip of the iceberg!

This is scary ! To think of all those people potentially wasting their time ..oh… woah!

Wait!!

Clay Shirky was talking about cognitive surplus..not time wasting!

Indeed, Wikipedia was created BECAUSE some people were willing to spend some time reading and browsing and…contributing to the site.

How could those people filter out the crap from the ocean of information?

If they can …can I do the same?

I keep talking about this new discipline of the XXIst century. My friend and colleague Harold Jarche has designed a workshop around this discipline that he calls PKM, Personal Knowledge Mastery.

This discipline is basically to design a methodology, a personal system, to help you surf through information available from the web but also from other sources.

The same method can be applied to music selection.

Basically, it comes down to

What do you need?
And who do you know who might know it…. or who do THEY know who might know it…

The power of the network!

The whole point is, some people in your knowledge networks certainly know more about any topic than you, the so called experts.

Or they might know how to summarize what you need, the godly curators!

OR they might be or know deep thinkers …the creators of new wisdom!

BUT… they should all be part of your knowledge networks.

Remember the village wise men/women ?

They were the gardians of traditions, storytellers of yore and expert shoppers….they just knew who were the real bargains!

What we once thought as gossip proved to be essential to direct your search for knowledge.

Contemporary social networks now fulfill part of this role.

You now need to find who to connect with in order to acquire this information.

You need your knowledge network to EXCISE the important stuff from the EXCESS that is threatening to engulf you.

Going back to music, I realized that I am the one some of my friends refer to for their choice of new music. I browse and listent lightly. I choose what I think will be appropriate for them. I suggest a few things out of the plethora of new music I test and assess.

And they love it.

But who will do it for me?

Do I even want that ?

NO. The rush of discovery is enough. I do not need to dig too deep to be satisfied.

My friend does that for me after my initial selection. The process comes full circle.

I am part of their knowledge circle. They are part of mine.

I do the same thing with my community of practices. My clients expect me to discover new magical gadgets, concepts, notions and principles for them. I do not dig but simply point the way.

And they feed me back the recently discovered insights with a new level of illumination.

I am part of their knowledge network. They are part of mine.

The journey is not complete however.

We went from POSSESS to ACCESS

From ACCESS to EXCESS