Interesting points about the photographic memory! I think successful people are not processing all the information, but are able to ask for the most important information (or even feel what really matters?) It's almost a paradox; the more information you have available, the worse it can get, because you can so easily get lost and create a lot of overhead. (God forbid you are struggling with decision making on top!)
For example, I remember our Corporate controlling catalog at Daimler Financial had over 100 pages of definitions and KPIs, but what really mattered was just small parts of it.
Probably emperors and kings were just as good with people and asking the right questions to make good decisions as today's best leaders are? I guess its about correctly reading the information and people. And then if you are not really a numbers guy maybe get a numbers guy to sit next to you.
I feel readily available information overload is both, a blessing and a curse.
Certainly. But I think that now that all information is reliably available, we kind of take it for granted, but hundreds or thousands of years ago, just having the info available was probably a huge advantage, and then someone could filter on top and decide what's important.
But if the info is lost to the sands of time, you can't even do that higher-level part on top.
The best organized empires were keeping a lot of things in writing, but even knowing *what* is written somewhere was probably difficult to keep track of without a search engine and a modern categorization system...
So value of someone with incredibly memory in a position to ingest a ton of that info was probably extremely high.
True. Somehow made me think of Dune and the Mentats! I also recently read The War for Gaul by Ceasar and it's really hard to imagine how communication was running in those times.
And all those things we will never know about, because they were not written down.
Interesting points about the photographic memory! I think successful people are not processing all the information, but are able to ask for the most important information (or even feel what really matters?) It's almost a paradox; the more information you have available, the worse it can get, because you can so easily get lost and create a lot of overhead. (God forbid you are struggling with decision making on top!)
For example, I remember our Corporate controlling catalog at Daimler Financial had over 100 pages of definitions and KPIs, but what really mattered was just small parts of it.
Probably emperors and kings were just as good with people and asking the right questions to make good decisions as today's best leaders are? I guess its about correctly reading the information and people. And then if you are not really a numbers guy maybe get a numbers guy to sit next to you.
I feel readily available information overload is both, a blessing and a curse.
Certainly. But I think that now that all information is reliably available, we kind of take it for granted, but hundreds or thousands of years ago, just having the info available was probably a huge advantage, and then someone could filter on top and decide what's important.
But if the info is lost to the sands of time, you can't even do that higher-level part on top.
The best organized empires were keeping a lot of things in writing, but even knowing *what* is written somewhere was probably difficult to keep track of without a search engine and a modern categorization system...
So value of someone with incredibly memory in a position to ingest a ton of that info was probably extremely high.
True. Somehow made me think of Dune and the Mentats! I also recently read The War for Gaul by Ceasar and it's really hard to imagine how communication was running in those times.
And all those things we will never know about, because they were not written down.
Mentats! I wonder if I was subconsciously thinking of that 🤔
But that's a great reference, thanks!