There’s a problem with the information age in which we live.

Information can be injected into your brain via any of the channels through which your senses flow, from what your eyes see, to what your ears hear, to what you viscerally touch and experience in your daily life.

That information, once in your brain, becomes an unconscious judge and jury for the way you allow yourself to act in real life.

If every day your brain is marinated in a pool of messages that sound like this:

• Never quit
• Always work harder
• But start practicing mindfulness
• Never get divorced
• Always raise the bar on goals and achievements
• And start living a minimalist life too
• Never give up on a friend
• Always take the high road
• And start new health and productivity habits

…you may end up navigating a path that is arbitrarily bound by all forms of either un-tested or un-fit advice. 

And why does this matter? Why not just “do all the things” and be the one person who can run with the bulls in every trend, fad, and piece of advice known to man?

I’ll tell you why. It’s because the end product of all those warring goals is a life that does not leave your bespoke stamp. There is a thing you were put here on Earth to do, and it needs your quiet, conscious and keen attention to become real and enable you to express your special gifts, in real form, before you die.

TL;DR

1. The ability to notice, label and judge all inputs to your brain is a critical life skill you must master in order to ensure your time and attention are consciously rationed in order to preserve this limited resource to be invested in what really matters to you.
2. The threat: It is not only the information that you knowingly take in, such as when you read a book, that is the problem. There are thousands more trojan horses marching millions of unfiltered messages into your brain undetected every day.
3. These packets of advice influence the way you act and the decisions you make. 
4. Yet many of the facts that infect your brain may be:
   
   • Untested, or blatantly false, or 
   • Unfit for your unique goals and your wiring.
5. And yet you may find yourself signing up for goals, commitments, memberships and mindsets simply because something snuck into your head to tell you you should. 
6. Doing all of these things is not your job and not the greater goal. 
7. Your big job is to give time and attention to your bespoke thing.
8. And to do that, you must back way up, long before you start signing up for every goal or trend out there, and do the much harder, very humbling job of un-choosing 99% of the noise that will draw resources away from your higher purpose. 
9. This vast un-choosing is part of the KindEdge.com practice of conscious curation. 
10. Conscious curation is a way of redesigning your life to ensure every person, environment, community, commitment and habit is the perfect fit for the future life you crave. 
11. Conscious curation is a big, hard, but fun journey that gets you giggling when you start to feel out light and in-flow your life can be when you purge the itchy, scratch, old, un-fit parts of your life.

Warning Will Robinson: Your brain is getting hit

Experts estimate that we consume 74 gigabytes of data each day, according to a 2009 University of California, San Diego (UCSD) study on human information consumption.

But according to this article published in the scientific news publication, Technology Networks, human thought operates at 10 bits per second, vastly slower than its ability to take in sensory input.

Yikes! How much data is pouring into your brain unfiltered? Well, a lot. More details can be found in this CalTech study on brain speed and this CalTech study on the filtering work the brain can, or cannot accomplish at speed.

Some of the information that seeps in might be bad data

In this wild wild west range of information, your brain may not know when it is taking in advice from a sage, proven expert vs from someone who just gets off on being heard, broadcasting overly-idealistic prescriptions for your problems just because they like how clever it makes them sound. Even true experts and researchers sometimes over-simplify their instructions in order to get more public attention, squeezing complex, deep research data into too-neatly-wrapped packages like “4 Steps to This” or “An Acronym for That.” 

Not only might the overly-pithy new-age maxims that your brain be leading you down one of Alice’s endless rabbit holes, but it may also be signing you up for the position of “unwitting lab test guinea pig” as the author, himself, may never have walked his own talk. 

Some of the data you hear that sounds like it’s coming from an experienced authority might be dangerously untested, or flat-out false. 

Yet if you hear about it enough, your brain might make you think that trend is normal and that you should follow that advice.

Some of the information that seeps in might be decent data…

but it might not be the right data for you.

Trying out new trends and fads is fine. But the more energy you expend chasing rabbits, the less energy you have to invest in your true higher purpose. If everyone else is into saying they’ve run a marathon, you might be pressured into joining the marathon training club just to become another person who can say “they did it.” However, the time you invest in getting that one particular gold star will take away from that little itch you’ve had in the back of your head about getting back into competitive ballroom dancing. Even while you are running mile after mile in a marathon training session, you are unconsciously choreographing tango dance routines in your head. 

So here’s the question: Will you let your brain’s bombardment with the message that “all cool people can say they’ve run a marathon” force you to become a marathoner who is a carbon copy of millions of other marathoners? Or would you do better to use that time and energy on the thing that will leave a truly bespoke expression of what is uniquely you? What if you finally started listening to that little voice in the back of your head and reignited your passion for choreography and ballroom dance competition? There is a danger in ignoring the quiet little voice in the back of our heads because we just can’t hear it over the cacophony of other outside messages filling the airways.

This discussion of heeding that little voice in your head is covered in a deep dive I shared on re-growing your atrophied intuition. You can read all about a scary but fun journey through The Pain Cave in this article.

Information can be blinding

Buy the latest guru book and you’ll get your fill of the best, most-trending pseudo-psychological labels for whatever your current challenge, goal or problem may be. But the more your brain attaches to those labels, the more powerless you become. 

The new labels you glean–most of which are just new monikers for the same old human life hazards that have been plaguing bipeds for centuries–will send you further down infinite rabbit holes. You’ll find yourself Googling, Chat-GPTing, Gemini-ing, Claude-ing and Wispr Flow-ing all the handy new handles experts are using to diagnose a problem. This quest lets you feel like you are on a path toward progress and real change, but, in fact, you are circling in place.

Judging “who” you follow includes the growing number of AI “whats” as well

Trust LLMs like you would trust a court jester. 

Their goals are to affect their own survival by 1) parroting what sounds correct by echoing what is most commonly said by others and 2) by giving you what it thinks you think you need (to please you). And it’s really hard to engineer a prompt with enough caveats and warnings to actually produce a trustworthy response in this category of research. 

Beyond that, anyone anywhere on the web can say that “they are the best” at X or Y and LLMs are known to encounter that text and regurgitate it to you. According to this video, How to Get Mentioned in AI, rather than actually doing deep comparative research, many AI tools are known to grab text from the first website they find that contains the statement “We have the best solution for X” and deliver that answer to you as if it were accurate vs. the marketing fiction it truly is. 

Imagine, for example, that a restaurant whose menu is clearly filled with 100% gluten-containing dishes, could arbitrarily decide to place a statement on its website saying “Giovanni’s Italian-Asian Infusion Restaurant is the best gluten-free restaurant in Greenville.” In response to an AI user’s search prompt “Find me a gluten-free restaurant in Greenville that is safe for my celiac disease,” the AI tool could happily deliver the false statement from the website, without analyzing the menu. And it will sound sage and confident as it tells you to head on over to Giovanni’s and eat up all their (unsafe for celiacs) food. 

YIKES. 

You don’t want that kind of misinformation for your health. Nor do you want that kind of misinformation for any other important life advice. 

With all the trust you are willing to place in outside sources, what would happen if you redirected some of that trust inward? What if you trusted your own intuition? Give this a try and I think you’ll find that:

1. You already know in your gut what you really want, and what has not been working for you thus far.
2. When it comes to how you pursue your what, you’d do better with an approach that does not require you to sign up for some new guru’s latest 10-step prescription, but rather to use a simple “one-size-fits-all” time-tested system that is sustainable for the long-haul.

This much-needed “one size fits all” sustainable system can be found in KindEdge’s practice of Infinite Self-kaizen. With Infinite Self-kaizen, you live in a continual mindset of: 

• Seeking and running new experiments in your life
• Keeping whatever works, without any form of judgment about the trials that fail or are just not the right fit for you right now
• Choosing what you keep based on your gut and your intuition, free of any outside messages that pressure you to conform to what is “normal” or what society says you “should” do.

If you are trying to achieve an important goal, but you continually find yourself failing to get up and work on your project at 4:00 a.m. like the latest guru fad says you should do, apply infinite self-kaizen! 

• Don’t judge your seeming failure to conform; it’s just an experiment that you’ve run in order to discover it’s not the right fit for you
• Run another experiment, based on your gut feel, without any judgment.

When you let your gut guide you it becomes clear that you are just one of those people whose most productive brain hours are at night. So why not run an experiment in your life and turn your daily routines upside-down? Why not completely reverse what society says about how humans should use the 24-hours in a day? Why not flip the order of all the things you do in a day?

Why not design your life to fit you? 

Forehead slap! See how easy it can be? You don’t need to read a 400-page process. Just apply some infinite self-kaizen to whatever you’re grappling with right now. When you unleash your trapped intuition, you get in flow with the way you were meant to be living. 

YOUR EASY, ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS TO PUT IN YOUR BACK POCKET:

Ok, you’ve now gained superpowers that are going to protect your brain from the continual flood of bad or unfit information hitting along your journey in this KindEdge Project of You.

Here are some easy actions you can take to continue to leapfrog over unfit information that could hijack you: 

1. Consciously notice and label

The ability to notice, label and judge all incoming messages is a critical life skill. We forget that no outside input is a greater authority for you than your own gut. News, authors and even researchers always come with their own biases. In fact, many times experts will admit in their second and third books that the advice they espoused in their first book was ill-fitting. For example: 

• Renowned author Malcolm Gladwell called himself out for damaging assessments he’d made in his earlier writings. Watch his mea culpa here and read what was said about it in The Guardian here.
• Cal Newport has often analyzed his earlier articles that he wrote as an un-married grad student and has admitted that he was imagining all people out there were like him and thus gave advice that would be completely unrealistic for someone who was a busy parent in a dual-career marriage.

2. Set your foundation first

Conscious curation starts deep within you. Instead of running around trying to look like all the other people, you’ll do better to take a moment alone in a quiet room where the only voice you hear is your own intuition. Let that voice spill out onto a blank piece of paper, capturing any truth that’s been buried in your mind, body, or soul. Let it become something written that you can read, re-read, and anchor to over time.

Output and accomplishment will come later. To lay a strong foundation you need this simply clarity on the mark you wish to leave on Earth after you’re gone.

From there, start with the very basics. Start poking, and testing and moving all the things around you. What fits the new focus for your future? What does not? 

Begin to purge the stagnant, stale or un-fit parts of your world. Curate only those objects, people, communities, habits, haunts and practices that will buoy your efforts toward change. Ask questions like:   

• This nice, expensive object in my life that takes a lot of time and effort to maintain, is it the right use of my daily minutes?
• All the events you attend by default, are they fuel toward building the network you need or the inspiring influences you seek?
• When you look at all the spaces through which you move during the day, are they keeping you in flow? Or are there jagged edges that slow you down?
• Does your daily schedule have a balance of priming your brain and body to do hard work, and then rewarding yourself and enriching your soul when work is done?

We have guided steps, personalized worksheets and do-it-with-you video instructions for this in the KindEdge Steps here:  https://kindedge-news.com/phase-one. One you create this rock-solid self-documented definition of your bespoke purpose, all other choices become easy.

3. Go balls-out on the KindEdge vast un-choosing activity

Once you get started, you’ll feel a weight lift and you’ll actually see how much more of what matters to you starts to get in motion in your life. Do it your way or get the guided process in the KindEdge Steps.

4. Use your rock-solid clarity to adopt a continual practice of conscious curation

Every day you have the ability to selectively curate what you invite into your life. Every single object (from pens to cars to houses and more), to people and communities, to mindsets, habits, systems and more, can be selected as you fill in all the blanks in your clean-slate life redesign. Read more on KindEdge’s practice of conscious curation here.

5. Adopt a bias for action

If you are reading your third, fourth or tenth book on a certain decision you are trying to make in your life, close the books and run some real-life experiments today. When you toss some balls out at the universe, you actually see how they bounce back. Real-life application generally does not play out the way the expert advice predicted it would. But this real-life learning is information that is many more times valuable to you and how you choose to navigate your future.

6. Seek visible evidence more than words

Whether it be the promise of losing weight from a diet, or the promise of eternal salvation from a given religion, look at the real-life evidence first. After a year of following the diet without any weight loss, do you keep blaming yourself for something that is clearly just not working? And if certain religious dictates leave you feeling out of alignment in your current life, do you really need to wait around to the second life to find out maybe that one’s a non-fit for you as well? In KindEdge we make all these practices and mindsets stupid-easy. I explain a little more on this "do what works” mindset here.  

7. Try Black Boxing the Information that Gets Into Your Brain

An easy way to filter the overload of advice pouring into your head is to use a mental model I call Black Boxing It.

In short, it is a practice wherein you place all the details of a problem or bit of advice into a metaphorical black box. This allows you to look at it from the outside, where you only see the bottom-line observable impact to you. You can read more about Black Boxing here.

Too often our minds get muddled by messages from outside forces that are not aligned with our own goals. These often sound like “but you have to… “ and “it would crazy to pass on up…” or “good / normal / popular / agreeable people would do x first.” 

Back Boxing these outside messages gets you out of the weeds of how smart the advice may sound and rather enables you to clearly evaluate whether that advice’s outcome aligns with your own greater goals. Black Boxing is a seemingly simple little life hack, yet it actually proves to be a transformational tool for gaining clarity around your most pressing life choices and decisions.

8.  Give your gut permission!

Yes!!! You can do this! You have every right to let your gut guide. Full stop. Even if 1,000 people have joined a program, or club or way of life, that never means that that is more normal or right for you. Do you, boo. 

How You Can Decode the Information You Hear

In this KindEdge video I walk through the process you can use to decode the underlying truth of the messages you hear from authors, podcasters, or influencers of any kind.

Example 1: Neurology Expert Advises on How to Champion Emotional Overwhelm but The Facts Show His Own Life is Out of Control

One neurology and personal growth expert I refer to in my video is advising on how to achieve a less overwhelming life. Yet as the discussion goes on, it becomes clear that he himself is piling on more and more into a life that is already out of control. His words suggest he has a clear picture on his purpose, but as he gets into the details of his life it becomes evident that he suffers from “do all the things to get all the gold coins” syndrome. It is clear that while he cognitively knows what should be done to achieve a deeper life, he remains attached to his desire to capture every outward-facing label of achievement that falls into his path. Is he really a good advisor for you and me? 

No, because here’s the deal. This guy is a carbon copy of thousands of other achievement-addicted folks out there who pursue more, and then more, and then more until they see the pattern that every next gold coin they capture does less and less to fill the hole inside them. And at that moment is generally also the moment wherein their spouse leaves them and they suddenly notice their kids have grown and they missed all the best years. In addition, if they take stock of the billions of dollars they have in the bank, they realize what they really want to leave behind when they die is some special skill they might teach their grandchildren, like how to fish, or to whittle wood. 

And then, as if they are the first ones to discover this morsel of wisdom, they write more books and speak on more podcasts to share their 50-year-old epiphany about what actually matters in life.

Forehead slap! - I told you so! 

And I keep telling you so in KindEdge.com!

TIP: You don’t have to wait for big life regrets to occur

You don’t have to wait 20 years for this wisdom to hit you. You’ve got all the wisdom with you right here, right now, in your wise, precious gut. 

This clever neurologist has not done the tough un-choosing in order to clear the table for his one higher purpose and a life of meaning, and little regret. He simply cannot resist saying “yes” to every opportunity to be seen achieving. He piles on more activities, more club memberships, and more goals. 

He’s a dangerous advisor to people like you and me as he is speaking words that will cause us to align our lives with his advice. We’ll sign on to his life prescriptions believing he’s the expert. But what he’s mapped out on paper does not work for him–or anyone–in real life!

The emperor wears no clothes.

A KindEdge mantra is #DWWIRL: Do What Works, In Real Life.

Example 2: Letting Untested Information in Your Mind Control Your Life Decisions

Another video tells of a woman who fell into a depression from burnout; she felt stuck and frozen in her life. She believed she had to “fix” her depression so she could return to work in order to maintain her professional status and career growth. But she describes a feeling of suffocation when she considers returning to work.

And if that problem wasn’t enough of a mental challenge on its own, she also says she feels pressure to get pregnant and have a baby. Yet when she imagines that, she feels stuck because she believes having a baby would negatively impact her career. 

She’s literally choking herself with the “all the things” mindset rather than parsing through her own needs and beliefs, and making one right choice toward one right vision that fits her one life here on Earth. 

She has a long way to go, but in KindEdge we back way the heck up from the big “ta-da” goals to make sure that we first design a daily life and rhythm that feels good for our own body and mind’s unique wiring. She could benefit from one of many things, from changing her career to something that lets her feel in flow with her creative energies, to saying f-it to the career fears and launching her own independent consultancy that enables her to play and experiment with clients whose demands would be a good fit for her new life and as mother. 

This is what we get you moving toward in KindEdge’s program: https://kindedge-news.com/phase-one. My heart breaks for this woman who is already past forty and is at risk of turning fifty, then sixty, then seventy without ever breaking free from the prison in which her soul is trapped.

Dubai Guy Gets It

Charlie Morgan moved to Dubai to be near entrepreneurs like him. But he applied the KindEdge methods of pausing to observe and then checking with his gut. Well done, Charlie! You win!

Charlie observed that, while Dubai inspires dreams of wealth, prestige and success, the more he filled his life with those “more” seekers, the less joy he felt inside. He saw that every person must make choices that fit their own unique vision for life, and then must pursue that, keeping blinders as they live amongst the many other people on their own very different pursuits. 

In KindEdge I share that want begets want. It sounds a bit woo-woo, like reverse manifesting by wishing for that which you do not have. But in reality, the more you pursue something you see outside of you, the more you begin to invest your limited resource of time in mimicking someone else’s purpose and journey. Achieving a dream that feels good to you cannot happen if you waste your time chasing whatever someone else has achieved. 

Thanks for sharing this moment with me on a very deep dive.

I encourage you to: 

• Narrow the scope of the big life changes you seek
• Do the actions you can achieve in 15 or 30 minutes today
• Start truly moving things around in your home and in your life
• And take time to get clarity on your future, but reduce the overwhelm of the long-haul and just get yourself in motion today.

 When today feels do-able, everything becomes do-able. 

 That's what we're doing on KindEdge.com. Big life change in small do-able steps to unlock the alternate ending to your life. 

 Cheers, cin-cin and hugs, 

 ~ MarySueIRL