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to buy a car. I can collect a lot of data about makes of cars, performance
ratings, prices and so on. Once I do that, I have a lot of information
about cars and the auto market. Until I think about this collection
of data - this information - and put it in context, it is “dumb.” By that I

mean it has no meaning. This is what we are flooded with every day.
On the Internet, we can find lots and lots of information - dumb
collections of data. Some of that information may be useful, and some

of it may be accurate. But living in an “information age” means we are
flooded all the time with access to more information than we can
possibly have time to put in context. We don’t have time to decide what
it means, and it comes at us so fast! The amount of information

available to anyone in the world today is absolutely staggering,
given historical standards. It is truly, lierally mind-boggling.

Third Step on the Wisdom Ladder: Knowledge
Once you spend some time interpreting and understanding a body
of information, then you have knowledge. This takes time. While
technology has greatly reduced the cost involved in assembling and

storing data, and in transferring and storing information, technology has
not done anything to make the process of creating knowledge any
quicker or cheaper. Creating knowledge still takes brains, thought and

time – especially today when there is so much more information
available to wade through. People can become knowledge experts for a
given subject, which, in an “information age,”means they really are just
advanced, perpetual students for that given subject. We rely on these

people to help us bypass the costly process of wading through large
bodies of information ourselves. As a result, the credibility of
knowledge experts is that much more important (and often hard to

assess). On the one hand, we have to be able to trust them to give us
honest, valid and reliable knowledge, and on the other, we lack the
subject specific knowledge to know whether or not they are really as
reliable and credible as we need them to be. It’s a catch-22: if we had

the knowledge with which to judge them, we would not need them in the
first place! So what’s the solution?

Top Step on the Wisdom Ladder: Wisdom
Wisdom is precious – and worth paying for. It comes from the
ability to synthesize various streams of knowledge – even seemingly
unrelated bodies of knowledge – enough to be able to make informed

judgments about various ideas and propositions that may lie outside of
our own direct areas of expertise. Certain patterns in nature repeat