Birds of the same feather....

In the corporate world, psychometric studies are regularly done to assess personality traits of individuals and to (ostensibly) ensure complementarities and a reasonable degree of heterogeneity at the decision-making levels. You don’t want a meeting room where every participant is strongly extroverted and highly judgemental. You also need someone like me.

The world of politics is littered with dead bodies of leaders who paid the price for cutting off honest, negative feedback and choosing to remain in the comfort zone filled with their sycophants. A good leader must listen to divergent views, even if from little boys who tells him that he is not wearing any clothes.

Alas, we bloggers and tweeters too have this tendency to form homogenous groups and to subcribe to feeds of others who hold views similar to ours. We want to listen only to those people who say what we want to hear.

Jonah Lehrer argues ( or rather, adds to the argument) that adding random strangers to your twitter feed can greatly enhance your creative potential – even when the tweets are nonsensical or just plain silly.

We naturally lead manicured lives, so that our favorite blogs and writers and friends all look and think and sound a lot like us…While this strategy might make life a bit more comfortable - strangers can say such strange things - it also means that our cliches of free-association get reinforced. We start thinking in ever more constricted ways.

And this is why following someone unexpected on Twitter can be a small step towards a more open mind. Because not everybody reacts to the same thing in the same way.

….And this is why we should all follow strangers on Twitter. ..Sometimes, all it takes is a stranger on the internet, exposing us to a new way of thinking…..

So, go through your "I follow' list and shake it up a bit. I strongly recommend that you retain your subscription to my blog  as I am known to offer contrarian views that will add to the diversity of inputs reaching you, but you may want to scratch  those other sycophants off the list.......