Happy New Year! (and a Recommended Resolution)
Wishing you and your family a happy and healthy 2024!
I’ll be posting my predictions later this week, but in the interim, I wanted to wish you and your family a happy and healthy 2024!
A Recommended Resolution
As many of you are aware, I’ve long felt that every perspective is biased, incomplete and limited, and it’s therefore simply impossible to fully-appreciate anything without adopting multiple perspectives. This is true in business, medicine, and almost all walks of life.
Yet for most of us, we tend to use social media, particular networks, or even particular personalities to guide us towards particular information. Unfortunately, that tends to create an echo chamber in which we are bombarded with perspectives that match our own. Many have used this reality to complain about the relative dearth of trustworthy news.
I have a different take. Rather than lament the biased nature of today’s information sources, I just accept it as a reality (every source has a limited perspective!) and seek to compensate for the bias with offsetting views that make it easier for me to think for myself.
If you’re a regular consumer of Fox News, for instance, I’d suggest you also turn on CNN or MSNBC to hear other perspectives. (Likewise, if you regularly listen to NPR, you might try turning on the Howie Carr Show). You need not agree with the other outlets or their takes on the news of the day, but the mere act of being exposed to different interpretations will prevent you from blindly believing certain views.
All of this brings me to my recommended resolution. Given the most common resolution made each year has to do with diets, I’d like to suggest we all diversify our media diets and begin consuming information from a variety of sources. Increasing our appreciation (and understanding) of differing views can create fertile ground in which civil discourse across important issues can grow and thrive, a dynamic that just might help reduce the polarization that is tearing our nation apart.
I discuss this idea, and a lot more, in my forthcoming book, The Making of a Generalist, which will be released later this month…Stay tuned for more information!
In the meantime, Happy 2024!
About Vikram Mansharamani
Vikram Mansharamani is an entrepreneur, consultant, scholar, neighbor, husband, father, volunteer, and professional generalist who thinks in multiple-dimensions and looks beyond the short-term. Self-taught to think around corners and connect original dots, he spends his time speaking with global leaders in business, government, academia, and journalism. LinkedIn has twice listed him as its #1 Top Voice in Money & Finance, and Worth profiled him as one of the 100 Most Powerful People in Global Finance. Vikram earned a PhD From MIT, has taught at Yale and Harvard, and is the author of two books, Think for Yourself: Restoring Common Sense in an Age of Experts and Artificial Intelligence and Boombustology: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before They Burst. Vikram lives in Lincoln, New Hampshire with his wife and two children, where they can usually be found hiking or skiing.
