Knowledge Is Like Power In A Light Switch
We live in the age of information.Got a question? Pull out the device in your pocket, which is more advanced than the tools the US President had in 1980, and you’ll get an answer really quickly. I know that you can’t Google the answer to everything, but having ideas and perspectives so readily available helps inform our own ability to do the right thing.
Knowledge alone doesn’t do much for you. Knowledge is like power in a light switch - It only works when you turn it on. Everything we learn is like wiring your house for electricity. There’s a lot of opportunity but the wiring itself isn’t going to turn on the lights or provide heat to cook food. That energy needs to be translated into something tangible in order for it to benefit you.
There’s a concept in physics called potential energy. This represents what could happen if circumstances change. For example, a bowling ball resting on the roof of a building has a lot of potential energy, because without the roof it will be pulled by gravity forcefully to the ground below. But when the bowling ball is at rest it isn’t actively expressing that energy, it is holding the potential of it.
That’s what knowledge is. It’s our potential to create change in our life through the ideas, perspectives, patterns, insights, and practices we’ve learned. But those learnings do nothing for you unless they are applied.
So my question to you is - Do you have a process around implementing your learnings? Do you have a way to implement the things you know? Because that’s the only way it will do something for you.
My process for this involves my daily behavior tracking sheet. This is where I set goals, design my habits, and make adjustments that affect my life based on what I learned. I made a video here for you here if you're interested to check it out!
This also gives me more focus so that I know what I want to be learning about, what would serve me to develop right now, so that the time I invest in learning creates tangible change in my life.
If you’re in the habit of learning, that’s great! But you need to do more with it for it to really be valuable to you.