Too much information, by Harari

In Homo Deus, Professor Yuval Harari paints head-scrambling pictures of the future, where power is freedom from misinformation, humans merge with robots, and people live to 200. In an Influence exclusive, he considers the evolution of communication

Traditionally, people lived in a world in which information was scarce. Power meant that you had access to information: the king had an archive and scribes; the peasants had nothing.

In the 21st century, people are flooded with irrelevant information, or misinformation. And power means knowing what to ignore. The rich and powerful, above all else, have the ability to focus.

Not having a smartphone is the new symbol of power because it provides the ability to have peace and quiet from misinformation. I don’t have a smartphone precisely because I care very much about my time. It’s not that I’m afraid of information leaking out and people spying on me; it’s that I’m afraid of irrelevant and, increasingly, fake information flooding in. It is becoming more and more difficult to know what to ignore and what to pay attention to.

Learn to change

To compete as an individual in the 21st century, the ability to change will be one of the most important mental abilities. Traditionally, we’ve had a view of life that divides into two main parts: in the first part, you mainly learn; in the second part, you mainly work and make use of the skills that you learned as a young person.

This worked perfectly well for thousands of years, but it won’t work in the 21st century because the pace of change is so rapid that most of what you learn as a teenager will be irrelevant by the time you’re 40.

So the most important mental skill that you’ll need is the ability to keep changing and reinventing yourself throughout your life. You cannot create a personal and professional identity and then stay with it. This is very difficult because, while you change quite easily as a teenager, you just don’t want to change when you reach your 40s and 50s.