The label made me easier to classify and comprehend

The word tag dates back to the fifteenth century.

The geographic origin is uncertain, but the etymology of the term is defined as:

A small, hanging piece from a garment.

It wasn’t until later in the eighteen hundreds that a tag evolved to mean a label. And it wasn’t until the second world war that the military began making use of tags on flight clothing and combat uniforms. Then in the late fifties, a paper company introduced new adhesive badges for people to wear in public.

But in my opinion, humbly speaking as someone who has worn a nametag every day for over half his life, the true beauty of the tag is in its ability to organize information.

Think about it from a computing and knowledge management standpoint. Ask any software engineer, and they’ll say how a tag is an instruction added to a piece of text in order to specify how it is displayed or interpreted. Usually it’s a keyword or a phrase or a name that identifies something as belonging to a particular category.

Just go to any blog or wiki or social media platform. The tag is the metadata that describes an item and allows it to be found again by browsing and searching.

Therefore, tags are this expansion of the information itself that add additional value, context and meaning to the data. And that’s a powerful tool. Because at its core, tagging is deeply human. One of our favorite activities to do as a species is trying to make sense of a chaotic world by imposing structures upon it. That’s why we tag things. It’s evolutionarily advantageous. Helping each other understand who’s who and what’s what keeps people safe.

Sure, there are countless examples of the many dangers of labeling. Certain were ordered to wear arm bands and badges at various times during the middle ages, and later during wartime to mark them as ethnic outsiders. Those tags served as badges of shame, and it’s about as disgraceful as human nature gets.

But let’s talk about the positive process of tagging.

When I decided to start wearing a nametag all day every day in college, it’s because I was lonely. I needed to make friends, meet girls and feel less isolated on this giant campus with sixteen thousand strangers.

And to my surprised, overnight, this little sticker changed my life. It gave my identity a handle by which people could grab it. The label made me easier to classify and comprehend, albeit to a small degree. People didn’t know much about my personality or values, but the tag did give them the one critical piece of data that moved the relationship forward.

Scott. That must be that guy’s name.

Now, the tag may not have defined me, but it did identify me. And that’s not an insignificant improvement upon being anonymous. The interpersonal distance between zero and one is massive.

Especially when you’re lonely and twenty years old. Turns out, when you wear a tag on your shirt, it allows you to be found again by browsing and searching.

Not unlike information. I don’t mean to trivialize my humanity by saying my personhood is just another piece of data. But let’s face it, we live in a world of atoms and bits. These are the two fundamental building blocks of our analog and digital existences. Both require tags.

What kind of tagging system do you use? How does imposing structure on the world help you make sense of your experience?

Answers to such questions only become more vital as our species evolves.

Buckminster, the great architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist, began warning us about this idea in the early eighties. He pioneered a model called the knowledge doubling curve, showing that human knowledge doubled approximately every twelve months.

Today, we’ve long since reached a point where relevant knowledge is increasing faster and in greater quantities than our constitutions can absorb. And as the architect famously said, what matters most is our ability to apply good judgement based on knowledge, aka, wisdom.

Tagging can help us with this. Rather than manually flipping through our memories like a librarian sorting through a card catalog, we can get in the habit of organizing. We can practice using keyword and phrases and labels name to identify experiences as belonging to categories.

Allow me to share my two favorite mantras for this process.

If you don’t write it down, it never happened.

If you can’t find it, it doesn’t exist.

Both sound like zen koans meant to cramp your brain. But I assure you they’re quite true and useful. Having worked at a half dozen startups in my career, I’ve seen firsthand just how powerful these expressions of tagging are.

Because no matter where I work, the same knowledge management problems arise. People have these brilliant ideas, concepts, frameworks and systems for solving problems and doing great work.

But when I ask them if they’ve ever written them down, the answer is inevitably, nah, it just exists inside my head.

For the love of god, I can’t underscore how endemic of a problem this is. The mind is a terrible office, and if we have any intention of maintain our sanities, then we need to regularly extract that data out of our brains and get it into more tangible formats.

Otherwise it never happened. It doesn’t exist.

Don’t you think it’s easier to get things out of your head than have them living inside of it? Wouldn’t it be smarter to systematize your knowledge and get it the hell out of your brain so that others could use it when you’re not around?

That’s why writing is the basis of all wealth. Because writing things down gets them out of your head and therefore makes them separate from you. Which means they can be named, tamed, claimed and reframed.

You have to announce to yourself, this is how I will remember this thing, this is how I will distill my idea down into a pointer for myself.

And that way, when I need to make decisions in the future, I can retrieve that whole line of reasoning.

Tagging matters. Get good at it.

What label would be an expand of the information itself and add additional value, context and meaning to your data?