You are what you eat... or... GIGO
GIGO for those into computers is a well-known acronym: garbage in, garbage out. Meaning, you can’t produce correct results from invalid input. It’s a long standing principle of computer science attributed to Charles Babbage himself (for the non-geeks?—?he is regarded as the “father” of the computer, having devised the first mechanical programmable computer - pictured above).
“On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question”?—?Charles Babbage in Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
I was recently interviewing a candidate for a role in the organization and he asked me why I had stopped writing my articles on LinkedIn. My immediate response was “well, it’s been crazy here at work”. But that prompted me to think about it some more, and look into where my time was going and what I was doing with it. And so this article was born (thanks for the nudge, Ben!).
I’ve recently changed roles in the company, joined a completely new part of the organization and in that process also moved across the country to a whole new area and getting settled into the new reality caused me to refocus my time. Sounds logical and a perfectly valid reason to give up the time it takes to research, think and put thoughts down in writing… or is it?
My reflection on where my time was going showed me that I was spending less time in traffic (generally a good thing) and therefore had more time to devote to other pursuits in my day. But what I also realized was that the 30ish minutes I used to spend daily each way to or from the office had become my “think time” or my “read time”, as evidenced by how quickly I had been going through my Audible credits (and how they are now piling up). Despite the drudgery that is normally associated with a daily commute, I had repurposed that time into a personal hour of my day devoted to learning and thinking.
And what did I do with the newly found time from the shorter commute? I used it for comfort. Extra time for some form or another of activity aimed at producing a sense of relaxation or escape from all of the changes. My personal “decompression” time.
So back to Mr. Babbage’s principle above, I realize now that I had replaced the quality of the input I received on a daily basis, from books, podcasts, interviews or simply from reflecting on them with more immediately gratifying inputs. And so Ben… Here’s the real reason why I haven’t written in a while: there simply was no quality output to be put down in writing because I haven’t been investing in the quality of my inputs.
And the bigger learning for me in all of this is that it’s very easy in the midst of pervasive change to give in to the notion that you’ll find time for learning and growing when a “new normal” is established. And that is garbage… Learning is not a destination or state, it’s a way of travel and approach. If you can’t find a few minutes of your day to concentrate on quality input for your brain or reflect on what is around you, then you know what kind of output you can expect...
Much like what we choose to put in our mouths will shape our bodies and well-being, so will what we choose to let into our brains. This is by no means a defense of certain kinds of content above others?—?you be the judge of what quality input looks like for you and your life. As someone who was born with great curiosity, I think of it as how I am trying to constantly expand the limits of my world. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it:
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”.
How do you think about the quality of your inputs? I’d love to hear others’ perspectives.