When I'm at my very best (and I'm not at the moment for various reasons), I take on information and retain it.
I think it's one of the only skillsets I have left which sets me slightly apart from the people I work with or the people I surround myself with.
I have a bit of a reputation for being able to drag up ridiculous and meaningless facts from the past or quotes from movies or chapters from books.
Often, though, when I find myself in these situations, I'm very much reminded of Stephen Fry's magnificent first biography and the story he told about how he would get beaten up by the big boys at the private boarding school he was at when he was able to win an argument because he was more intelligent or had more information to hand.
Invariably, when those circumstances would arise, they would say to him something like “you can argue anything with words, Fry” before punching him.
And so, at home this week, Callum tried to do this to me in a family discussion that the two of us were having in relation to disruption of mobile phones.
Callum is now 15 and has decided to take it upon himself to do his homework whist being interrupted by Snapchat and Instagram about every seven or eight seconds.
I tried to explain to him the concept of ‘shifting tax’ and how we lose our concentration and our quality and our ability to function properly when we are continuously disturbed by electronic devices or other means.
In my life it happens when I open my inbox to try and find an email to work on and see 17 other emails, which I feel I have to start working on, therefore, losing the opportunity to do the initial task.
It happens to me when I'm writing a blog and I decide I want to research some fact or aspect of what I want to write about, which often comes from Wikipedia, and therefore I open my computer, see a notification and start working on something else.
In the midst of the discussion with Callum, he started to become exasperated and tell me that he was ‘fed up with all of this crap from podcasts’ or an equivalent thing.
And so, what to do about that?
Because it's a problem that I get with my wife and my daughters at points where they roll their eyes and say “that will be from one of his books” or “that will be from one of his podcasts” etc etc etc.
What I try to do when I'm at my best is limit the information that comes in, of the quality that I want and from the direction that I want and I'm not always or even ever successful at doing this.
But I will pick a subject or a topic or a medium and investigate through that and then try and retain as much information as I can in the hope that it will make me better or quicker or smarter or generally just happier that I have more information on a topic that I wanted to investigate.
One of the things I've been looking at for the longest time now is intersectionality and the problems we have in society about managing discrimination and inclusion.
I suggested in a blog earlier last week that I'd like to talk about that a little bit more as we move forwards, both in terms of the podcast and the monthly blogs and the ones that go out each day.
In order for me to claim a view about that, though, I would need to research it to some degree and there is no one in the world who has researched it completely.
Of late, I've been going deeper into civil rights in the United States and what happened through the sixties and seventies and where we are today, because I feel that is one of the basic areas that we can understand better to understand where we are now, both in terms of race, equality but in terms of all the equality that we find.
The difficulty is that if I ever decide to say anything about this, I'll probably be open to the same criticism as Stephen Fry.
‘You can argue anything with words”.
Blog Post Number - 3292
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