Master Your Mind

6 Master Your Mind by Mastering Your Input: Programming Your Mind for Automatic Results

Garbage in, garbage out.

—Anonymous

Take care of the beginning and the end, and the middle will take care of itself.

—Dan Moore, president of Southwestern Advantage

You’ve heard the saying “Garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO). It seems that it originated as a slang phrase among math and computer science experts, but it’s been used to describe the relationship between input and output in a myriad situations.

Wikipedia offers the definition:

In computer science, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is where flawed or nonsense input data produces nonsense output or “garbage.”

The principle also applies more generally to all analysis and logic, in that arguments are unsound if their premises are flawed.

Techtarget.com describes it this way:

GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) is a concept common to computer science and mathematics: the quality of output is determined by the quality of the input. So, for example, if a mathematical equation is improperly stated, the answer is unlikely to be correct. Similarly, if incorrect data is input to a program, the output is unlikely to be informative.

And the concept really applies when it comes to you. In your life, the quality of your output is a direct result of the quality of your input. Consider your physical well-being. If you eat too much fast food food, you will end up undernourished, weak, and probably overweight and ill.

And the principle shows up in the ...