Life Organizes with Information

Today we focus on Pattern #5 from The Way Life Works: Life Organizes with Information.

Life has taken 4 billion years to reach its present state of activity. This requires a lot of information. Throughout this entire span, life has relied on one code to organize the information necessary to live, reproduce, and diversify. This basic code is DNA, where life stores it’s information.

Based on this startling fact, what implications can we draw on how to best lead our lives? Here are some of the implications I see:

We must learn to communicate by providing information to others, and to actively learn from the information provided to us by our environment.
We must recognize with so much information coming in and going out, there are bound to be mistakes. Just as DNA makes coding mistakes in our genes, we all make daily mistakes in our lives. The key is to learn from our mistakes.
Since we cannot take in everything at once, we must learn to screen out information. As Aldous Huxley says, “There are things known, and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
When we communicate, we must remember that we are not a podcast just spewing out information. Rather, we are always engaged in the dance of the dialogue. We move between talking and listening, as we use our brains to process information.
We now are bombarded by so much information, we cannot store or save it all. We must remember to sort, delete, giveaway, or otherwise dispose of information that we no longer need. One of the biggest dangers we face today is information overload.
As much information as there is in the universe, there is only one thing you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self.
In today’s world, genius is being able to use and communicate information creatively. According to E. O. Wilson, ” We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world, henceforth, will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information together at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”

Here’s a challenge for you:
For one day this week, try not taking in any new information. Just focus on synthesizing what you already know, and see what you can learn.

For your information, and an idea of what I will be covering periodically over the next several months, here are the Sixteen Patterns which unite us all: