The French author Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in 1826 wrote: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” The notion that “you are what you eat” speaks to all that you consume. For leaders, this is especially true of the information you consume.

To be a great leader, you must be a careful and efficient consumer of information.

It has always been true, but it has never been a more critical concern than today. While access to information has become practically limitless, the discernment needed to make the best use of what you learn becomes crucial. Your decisions are always a factor of two, sometimes competing factors: your mind and your gut. How you feel about the information you glean will determine how you choose to make use of it. It is often difficult to decide what is true or not, but choosing amongst competing truths is what makes a leader most effective.

The human mind is a perpetual meaning-making machine.

We use our senses to consume raw data and then cook it using the ingredients we have stored away from our past experiences using recipes that amount to our values and beliefs suggesting what is right. There is always some implicit bias that impacts your decisions: your personal reality is shaped by how you feel.

How you think is what actually determines what you are.

It also informs what you can be.  Information is food for your mind, so how well you choose what you consume will ultimately determine how you perform. Accordingly, you must decide what to consume and what not to consume. It is impossible to learn everything you might need to understand, and therefore it is imperative that you are mindful of what you must know. But how do you know what you don’t know?

The author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodman cites good leaders’ qualities: humility, empathy, resilience, self-awareness, and self-reflection. She suggests that good leaders remain calm under pressure and demonstrate considerable self-confidence by surrounding yourself with people who will argue with you.

Goodman’s views might be constructive in two ways. One way to discover what you don’t know and need to know is to listen to those who disagree with you, hence the need for humility, resilience, and self-reflection. The other aspect is a bit more subtle. You can understand things and still be unable to use them. Empathy and self-awareness require practice and seem elusive in many people who discover that they can exert their power over others. Assuming positions of authority gives way to opportunities to manipulate people to have them perform to your liking.

Great leaders cultivate performance causing people to be inspired.

In the final analysis, being a smart consumer of information amounts to whether or not you can effectively convert that information into wisdom and action.

Without wisdom, knowledge is impotent. You must be able to apply what you know so that it creates or contributes value. Wisdom, absent action is even worse. Having the ability to offer value, and choosing to do nothing with it is tragic. And taking action without wisdom is foolish and even dangerous. The most tragic decisions are those where you simply ponder, “can I?” without first considering, “should I?”

Being a smart consumer of information may be challenging, but it is necessary. But it is only possible when a sense of purpose guides you. Exceptional leaders choose what they consume by making their cause in life noble and indelible. They understand that what they consume defines them and that you will either decide to shape your destiny or else someone else will.

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