What is the true value of the information you consume?

To answer this, it can often help to follow the trail to the source of that information. For instance, if you are reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, and subscribe to his 10,000 hours rule, is that the end of how you think about that topic? A little digging to follow that threads of his research will lead back to Anders Ericsson, the originator of the research behind that idea, and what he sees as the “mis-translation” of that rule.

We all search for the easy fix, the nugget of pure wisdom that solves the problem. It's rarely the case that we find that silver bullet that changes how we think. Instead the true salve for our frustrations usually come from our lived experience. The obstacle is the way.

With so much of my work as a coach, I am working with people to uncover more and more about the basic assumptions that sway their way of thinking, as well as the hidden blindspots that trip them up. Being a techie, I sometimes use the analogy of bits and bytes. If you regard each piece of information or each story as a byte, what are the bits that make it up?

Where else might you be taking assumptions at face value? And what is it worth to break down an assumption and talk about those individual parts in order to understand the whole?