Kofi Annan was the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations, serving from 1997 to 2006, and he won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2001 jointly with the United Nations. He speaks English, French, and several African languages fluently. Kofi Annan has used his education as a powerful tool to become a global leader and work diligently on important issues from human rights to the world economy. One of his strengths is his knowledge. He has the ability to look at problems individually and also globally and highlight the point that personal issues affect the entire world.
The biography of Kofi Annan is a powerful testament to the fact that knowledge is power, whether you agree with his policies and decisions or not. Information is liberating, and education is the premise of progress.
You have no excuse to remain in the dark today. You have access to the tools that will bring you knowledge and aid your progress in this world. How are you building your knowledge right now? What are you doing to liberate yourself from the bonds of ignorance? No one is going to take those steps for you. You cannot blame your lack of education for your failure. You can obtain knowledge in so many ways today, and you do not have to pay a heavy tuition to get it.
What are you doing to obtain the knowledge you need to achieve success in your life?
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Paul had a flat tire one morning. He went online immediately to find the tire shops closest to his house. None of them were open yet, so he called in to work and told his boss he would be a bit late. In the meantime, Paul spent an hour on the Internet. By the time the shop opened at eight o’clock in the morning, Paul had checked out the bus and train routes online, used MapQuest to find out how many miles it was to his office, and used another site calculate the time it would take to ride a bike there, joined an online carpooling network, and submitted a down payment for an electric-assist bicycle.
Paul could have done some work from home, but instead he got sucked into the black hole of information that is available to him through any number of technological devices. He started looking for answers, and his common sense went right out the window.
Has this ever happened to you on some level? You are on the receiving end of a lot of information every day through TV, radio, and the Internet, not to mention other human beings who have also picked up tidbits they would like to share. What do you do to stop the noise and maintain your common sense?
Information isn’t everything. It is also important to have face-to-face communication, relationships, wonder, and peace and quiet, among other things. What can you practice in your everyday life to make sure that you don’t lose your common sense when you go searching for information?
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You have been thinking and writing in your journal about the difference between information and knowledge for several days now. What are some of the conclusions you have drawn?
Information is merely a collection of data. Knowledge is what you have when you are able to turn information into understanding. It usually comes through experiencing whatever you are learning about. A blind person could be given a stack of information on paper, but it would mean nothing to them, because they have no way of turning that information into understanding. A person who is born and raised at the North Pole could hear stories about what it’s like to live in Florida, but they don’t have real knowledge of what it feels like to sit in the blazing sun and sweat on a sandy beach in Ft. Meyers in July until they are able to experience it themselves.
Information can be a tool for success, but it is important to build your skills at picking out only the information that is important to you and then utilizing that information to develop your knowledge. If you are greedy with information and grab a hold of everything you can get, you will be swimming in data, and it will be difficult to figure out what is important to your ultimate success and what isn’t. Technology is a lot of fun, and it can certainly help you get ahead in life. Just make sure that you are not drowning in information.
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