With ever more people blogging and hubbing, writing books and articles, it is little wonder that many of us feel overwhelmed by all the information available on the internet.

I have a simple answer, “Read less, Think more.”

A carpenter doesn’t need every chisel available, he just needs a good set of them to get the job done. Likewise, whatever it is we do in life, all we need is to master a few good skills.

As everyone else hurtles after the madding crowd, keeping up with the latest trends, take your time, consider your options and in many instances you will get where you want to be sooner than the helter-skelter crowd. Hey, 95% of people are getting it wrong most of the time and that’s true of just about everything in life ... health, wealth and happiness.

This doesn’t mean we should keep our heads in the sand or resist change, it simply means that, more often than not, there is more than enough time to think before we act. In fact, there’s always more than enough time to think for yourself before you act.

Another way to deal with information overload is to “Read fast, Forget quickly”.

What’s the point in remembering irrelevant information? The best way to forget things is to skim or scan material and, if nothing catches your attention, move on to the next thing. I used to own a diamond mine where the final sorting of the gravel used to be done by hand; a person needed a quick eye to scan over the multitude of stone as one scraped one layer away at a time searching for the precious gems. I can still see, in my mind’s eye, the exact location of all the best gems I discovered but the millions of other stones are nothing but a blur, confined to the dustbin of long-term memory.

Every time I uncovered a gem I would pause, lift it from the masses of other stones, place it in a special, hand-carved, wooden container typically used by alluvial diamond miners in South Africa, and then continue with the sorting.

It was an excellent lesson for life; not everything has equal value. Learn to spot the gems, pause, think, absorb and assimilate and then move on ... and forget the rest!

And one final thought, we don’t need all of the best! We just need as much of the good stuff as we need to live the lives we want to live. If more of the 95% of people who live below their potential would just slow down long enough to think a little, I would guess that a whole lot more of us would live more satisfying lives.