The Misleading Glory of Information Gathering
You want to go on a vacation. You want to understand some of the things that happened to you in the past, and how they are affecting you now. You want to start your own business. You want to throw yourself a fun birthday party. You want to do anything that requires some planning or digging deeper. So where do you start? Likely with a ‘quick’ Google search to collect some information because nowadays, all of the answers are online. Aren’t they?
So you Google ‘best vacation spots in Canada’ and there are literally millions of results. 57,300,000 in fact. Phew. That’s just a few articles to go through. So you start clicking and reading. Clicking and reading. Clicking and reading. You’re gathering information. Now you have narrowed it down to the top 10 places for a vacation in Canada so what do you do next? You start to research each of those 10 places which garner a further 600,000,000 results. Phew. A few more articles to go through. So you start clicking and reading. Clicking and reading. Clicking and reading. And before you know it, weeks have passed and you still haven’t narrowed down where you are actually going on vacation.
Okay let’s look at another situation. You want to get better at setting boundaries so you Google ‘how to set boundaries’ which gives you 429,000,000 results. You could spend a lifetime reading through all of the ways you could set boundaries, without actually setting a single one. All of this information gathering feels good — it’s passive, and you get a little dopamine hit with each click and each ‘useful’ piece of information you find. But all of this information gathering actually amounts to zero action being taken and it is easy to get stuck in the glory of this information gathering stage — you feel like you are accomplishing something and getting somewhere when in reality, you haven’t even started the engine.
None of this is to say that gathering information is bad because it isn’t, but as with everything balance is important and gathering information is good to a point. In the age of Information Overload there is more information at our fingertips in a single Google search than there was in an entire lifetime of someone living in the early 1800’s.
As a rule I allow myself to look at 10 results before making a decision and moving on otherwise I could get stuck in the glory of the information gathering stage indefinitely. Action is where it is at. Action is where we make things happen. Action is what gets us from point A to point B. Action is what changes our habits which in turn changes our lives.
At the end of the day, you are up to you. Something I try to remind myself of is ‘If it is to be, it is up to me’ and that requires me to do more than just sitting behind a screen gathering data without putting anything I learn into action. Some answers can be found online, but more often than not the answers are already within us and we use the information gathering stage because it feels like we are taking action. It feels safe. It feels predictable. And ultimately it feels like we can justify what we already knew and felt all along with every Google search that aligns with how we feel.
Ask yourself, how did you come across this article? What led you here? What were you looking for? How many articles have you already read? Have you taken any action or are you getting stuck in the glory of the information gathering stage?
