It sounds like a joke, doesn’t it?

Of course you think for yourself! The facts, ideas and decisions that accompany you when you make decisions are in your own head. Nobody else owns them, or controls them, right?

The truth is that different people, institutions, and ideas have a strong influence on all of us. For each idea that comes to us, we need to look at a few factors;

• What is the source of the information? How do we know that we can trust that source?
• What is the medium of the message? Are some media more trustworthy than others?
• How much truth is in that message? How well constructed is the argument? Is it backed up by facts that we can verify?
• What is the message asking of us? Are we meant to change our minds, change our behavior?
• Is the message asking us to act on our intuition, our feelings, or is it strictly rational and logical ?

This series is meant to give you the tools you need to go through these steps, make better decisions, and filter out the “trash.”