Humanity has never stored this much
Chapter 16 of Work Identity: we do not lack data; we lack meaning that connects scattered pieces of work into a coherent story.
Humanity has never stored this much
Never before… have people stored as much as they do today.
- Thousands of photographs.
- Tens of thousands of messages.
- Hundreds of documents.
- Folders that never stop growing.
Storage keeps getting cheaper
Storage keeps getting cheaper.
But something else seems to be shrinking.
The ability to see what truly matters
The ability to see what truly matters.
Perhaps…
We do not lack data; we lack meaning
We have never lacked data.
What we lack is meaning.
A file knows very little about its creator
- A file knows very little about the person who created it.
- A photograph cannot tell what happened before it was taken.
- A report does not know how many failures were required to produce it.
Data records the result, but rarely the journey
Data records the result.
But it rarely records the journey.
There is much to store, but the story is difficult to tell
Perhaps… that is why
more and more people have so much to store,
yet find it difficult to tell the story of who they are.
The most valuable things have been fragmented
Not because they have nothing to say.
But because the most valuable things have been broken apart into hundreds of pieces.
Each piece lives somewhere else
And every piece…
is stored in a different place.