Status: Draft, musings
Knowing is not enough. We must use what we know, take action with what we know, internalize what we know, live by what we know.
By “knowing”, here I mean just knowing something intellectually. For instance, one might know spaced-repetition can be powerful. But without putting that knowledge into use and actually actively trying it out, that “knowing” isn’t going anywhere. It is just potential value. There is a difference between knowing the name of something vs knowing something. And there is a difference between knowing something and living that thing.
This is one of the problems with me. I collect tidbits and pieces of knowledge like this and am always on the lookout to add more to my knowledge base. In my early to mid teens, I used to devour self-help books and keep notebooks full of great quotes. And then, in college days, stuff around productivity. And in recent years, stuff on learning, gratitude, happiness, and so on.
In a way, maybe I’m just using all of them as productivity/life porn, basically an insiduous form of procrastination on life. It feels good to know stuff and it’s also easier to just know things rather than do and use those things. Deep work, Atomic Habits, How to be Happy, How to lose weight, How to learn, How to learn a piece of tech, best resources for X, … and on and on the list goes. All of this is great but then, here is the thing: I could have been much more effective, skilled, happy (in a long-run sense), and many other desirable things if I had just focused on applying what I knew (even though it is a very small portion of all that I could know) instead of looking for more knowledge, more information, this never-ending firehose of information.
In retrospect, it was one reason I stopped/paused Things Of Note. It felt like I was just forwarding these ideas (which can be great too) but without having quite internalized/applied/lived them.
It also extends out to a lot of aspects of my life. Professionally, there have been many situations where I know something could be done better, know where the areas for improvements are and yet when it comes to tackling that which needs to be tackled, I falter, hesitate, procrastinate.
And personally too. It may be something I would do well to learn, something I should do more (e.g. I know I love writing and yet don’t do much of it), a habit I should develop, a paper it’d be great to consume, a course that would propel my learning forward, some people it’d be great to reach out to… and so on and on.
There is the nagging feeling that maybe I have what I want, that some part of me wants this inescapable loop, that I am okay putting up with this loop.
And then there comes the meta-realization. The “knowledge” that what I should do is: be kinder on myself, that a lot of this seems simple and is simple but certainly not easy by any stretch. And that I know knowing is not enough. That I need to act on this meta-knowledge. That I should bury what’s in the past and look at what’s ahead. I know.
Written on August 11th, 2021 by Bijay Gurung