As described before in earlier blog posts, one constant in my life has been a drive for learning, a passion for which I’ve had since I was a child. There’s almost a kind of high I experience when I learn something new. I enjoy finding out what I thought about something was actually wrong, skewed, or overly simplified. Instead of disliking being challenged re: to my ideas, I seek out those colleagues & friends whose backgrounds & expertise I respect for intellectual sparring. Perhaps some of this relates to my being a Libra (the lawyers & debaters of the zodiac) or maybe it’s tied to a need for feeling like I’m always growing & learning & deepening my understanding of things? To this end, I started & run a book club for our Gen Ed org within our higher ed institution, but I also have been pushing myself to read more & more nonfiction to complexify my thinking. Recently, I read that CEOs consume on average 60 books per year, or 5 books per month, which makes sense when you realize that these are the thought leaders who are trying to shape field discussions on a national or even global scale. I guess you could say that a happy byproduct of my living in Utah, so far away from family & friends back home in New Hampshire, has been a need to invest in my colleagues—whom I greatly respect. When I was in NH, my therapist pointed out that I didn’t tend to hang out a lot with people from academe or develop friendships with other PhDs or people at my level of education. When she asked me why, I felt stumped. It wasn’t a conscious thing on my part, but I did notice that I wanted to keep work & home separate, so I didn’t “hang out” a lot with colleagues.

Weirdly enough, when I left my last position & started my new one, I started to invest more in former colleagues-turned-friends & deepened friendships with colleagues at my current place of employment, as the culture is a uniquely positive one there (or here, rather). There isn’t a sense of competition in such intellectual exchanges, & I feel like people respect & esteem me.

Thus, I now have a number of people with whom I share ideas & discuss books, articles, & even LinkedIn Learning or internal training courses that I’ve been taking. The effect has been a very positive one, though likely more costly in terms of my book spending habits. The latest focus for me has been on Big Data, data analysis, & data visualization. So much of what I do, day to day, relies on dozens of reports & data streams from many different platforms, ranging from PowerBI & Tableau to Excel sheets & tools for visually representing data to accompany narratives or stories to be told. As I work with different teams to explore & challenge findings, I’m seeing my own data literacy growing. As much of what I do ties to strategy, vision, & the future of work, data literacy will remain a very important skill that I & all humans will need to hone. We have witnessed the dangers of ignorance or misrepresentations of data over the past two years, whether related to the presidential election or to information about the COVID-19 pandemic. The concept of “fake news” & outright deception that preys on a public’s lack of data literacy almost interrupted a democratic election process, with frightening potential ramifications. Like Orwell’s 1984, those in political power within fascist regimes use limiting information & promoting ignorance as strategies for manipulating a mass public into submission. To be able to discern between substantiated, evidence-based arguments & outright propaganda requires some training & experience, a practicing in the ability to follow lines of logic in order to identify gaps & holes.

In a world of constant streams of information & media, the human mind easily becomes overwhelmed. Our poor human brains can only hang onto 3-4 ideas for 20-30 seconds in our short-term memory—meaning that our minds have a tough time filtering out noise & thought clutter that interfere with out ability to synthesize information & commit it to memory more long-term.

Part of my goal in blogging more regularly relates to this commitment to reflect on the things that I’m learning & to be more deliberate in thinking through critical issues both in work & in life. Already, I’m finding myself pleasantly surprised by the level of engagement my blog entries have been creating, as that imposter syndrome creeps back in & makes me wonder why people would be interested in what I’d have to write or say. And, yet, I feel so gratified when my introvert quirkiness finds likeness in a reader who’s decided to comment or share a personal experience. For fellow introverts, we prefer deeper thinking & more intellectual exchanges which require time, focus, & complication of thought. We prefer that one-on-one exchange that reaches a more intimate exchange of ideas than simple surface smalltalk. Actually, there are few things that annoy me more than smalltalk. And it’s not because I want to be rude or that I think myself superior to anyone. Quite the opposite, really. I just know I have limited energy in exchanges with other people, so I try to make sure that I spend that energy reserve wisely & with purpose. It’s funny. I have a hard time even just reading for pleasure, or watching shows without learning something. So, I gravitate to nonfiction tomes or watch documentaries that will help me to feel like I’m feeding my mind.

The weird irony is that the more I know the more I know what I don’t know—which is a LOT. No matter how much I learn, I still feel so ignorant & limited. I see people around me who are so much smarter & more capable, who have better balance in winning in what seems like every arena. And me? I start to feel like I’m only scratching the surface of things.

Adam Grant in Think Again (& in the recent video training & keynote speech he provided to executive leadership at my work two weeks ago) explains that we need those disagreeable givers, the people in our lives who may not always tell us in the nicest or easiest way the truths we need to hear in order to grow. The idea is that these curmudgeonly friends, while brusque or even blunt, offer us critical feedback & constructive criticism we need in order to grow intellectually. We NEED people to challenge us & push us to reconsider what we think is the right answer or only correct view of something. The problem is that we often assume blinders that limit our field of view & ability to see truth, that we stop having the curiosity to see the world from a scientific method of always testing to see if a truth we think we know still holds. We need to have the humility to own that we have gaps in our thinking & ability to see a subject, & we then need to actively listen & keep an open mind to be willing to learn something new (especially if our previous understanding was inaccurate or entirely off). Mind you, that requires a kind of humble nature that not every introvert can always maintain, or least not one that I can always maintain, so maybe this is really unique to me? But I am trying to work on this. So, all of this to say that we all need people to challenge our way of thinking & what we think we know. We depend on those whose perspectives we respect & backgrounds we acknowledge as critical for complicating our world or issue views.

Now, to dive back into my LinkedIn Learning course on data visualization & storytelling, building on that IDEO course I took in February on Storytelling for Influence. Happy learning & thought exchanging, dear readers!