Information Mindfulness. Critical Thinking. Science Literacy. Evaluative Thinking. Skeptical Inquiry. Many different ways of saying pretty much the same thing: checking the information presented to you.

If you aren't doing this and you are just consuming whatever information is put in front of you, you'll start to believe anything. This makes you:

- corporate bait
- a victim
- manipulatable
- a sheep
- gullible
- open to use and abuse

Those who aren't mindful of the information that they consume are easily controlled by marketing messages. Easily influenced by influencers. Controllable and most importantly, monetised. 

The ability to be mindful of information is not natural nor is it easy, but everyone can do it and should do it. It's a journey, not a long one, but an important one. You must start on that road today, start questioning and interrogating the information given to you. Check the source. Question the validity.

Tooling needs to come under greater scrutiny, because all the digital tooling that we use comes with assumed validity, which is crazy - because many have highly questionable validity. It's like using uncalibrated equipment and just assuming they're giving accurate readings - and in the case of analytics, this is a major issue.

No-one wants to hear this stuff, but you 100% NEED to hear it.

The quality of information is going to be a critical success factor, not only for your own career progression but for the brands we work for. GIGO still stands. We're still throwing garbage in and surprised when we get garbage out. Learn garbage, make garbage.

When we have a more critical eye on informational validity, humans of the world will be more personally empowered to defend against unethical corporate behaviour, to not be corporate victims being milked for cash. We have to teach our kids and the newer generations, but we need this level of awareness right now, across the board, all generations, globally.

Please start your personal journey of informational awareness and mindfulness. Question everything, assume nothing. Very soon it starts to become habit and then you're building levels of information armour that will stay and protect you in this dangerous and unpredictable Digital realm.

About the image:
Getting the AI to generate a black female without an afro took me very many repeated attempts. It's ridiculous, but apparently this is progress...so apologies, I ran out of credit/tokens just as I got a non-afro hairstyle and had no more rolls of the dice. It's not prompt engineering, it's prompt hacking and blind luck at the moment. Throw a prompt at it, see what works, what used to work might work, or it might turn pathological liar just to keep you on your game...