Tag: Knowledge

All I Know is that I Know Nothing

“To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.”

Socrates

The realization that you don’t know much as you think you do is a humbling and important experience.

There’s a great line by Richard Williams, Director of Animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit that encapsulates this feeling perfectly. He was finishing up his first animated film, The Little Island, and around that time Disney’s Bambi came out in theaters. “… I saw Bambi again and almost crawled out of the theatre on my hands and knees. ‘How did they ever do that?’ I’d learned just enough to realize that I really didn’t know anything!”

You have to be a little naive and arrogant in the beginning when you are just starting out on a new venture (be it a business, project, prototyping an idea, learning a new skill, etc). Otherwise, you’ll know too much to start and overwhelm yourself.

Knowing what you know now, would you have started if you knew how hard it would be to get where you are?

You have to be naive and inexperienced enough to try new things.

Zen Buddhists describe this is having a beginner’s mind. A beginner’s mind is open and ready to learn.

Eventually, you learn a thing or two about your craft. You start making things, designing things, selling things, and get good enough to move things forward. Product sales role in. Your design clients like your work. Your art gets praise. Your song gets applause.

But then you see a professional at work. You see someone who does what you do, but a hundred times better. Heck, you didn’t even realize your guitar could do that. For example, take one look at some of the designs on Dribbble and you’ll realize your designs are garbage designs. “Are they using the same app I’m using?? How do they even make colors and shapes look like that??” The same is true for any skill, venture, or activity. And you realize that—

There’s a lot of incredible creatives and entrepreneurs out there.

It’s painful when you realize you aren’t as good as you want to be.

(It’s also painful when you see someone doing things worse than you are, but they are getting all the praise and attention—Topic for another day.)

But this is a great place to be in. This is another one of those pesky turning points that separate those that succeed and fail. You could stop. You could let someone’s brilliant work make you feel down about yourself and lead you to quit. Or—

You can let it lift you up and inspire you to do better.

Knowing that there’s a lot you don’t know is a great mindset to be in. You’ll learn must faster and more effectively. Humility leads to growth. Once you get past the initial ego-sting of realizing you aren’t the best, you can use the brilliance of others as an experience to seek out advice and to get better.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner | Daily Blog #913

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The Currency of Knowledge

“Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.”

John Adams

“Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.”

Peter Drucker

Money isn’t the only thing that gets you far in life. Although an important component of any entrepreneurial or creative endeavor, you could argue money is the least important resource. (Blasphemy!)

Not to say that money is easier to come by — it takes a lot of work and skill to create money. But there’s no limit to how much you can make (There might be false limits or mental limits that cap you, but technically, if you think about it, you can make as little or as much as you want.)

Time, energy and knowledge, however, are more finite. There’s only so much time and energy we have to give. By the time you’re old enough to read and understand this, you’ve already given decades of your time and energy.

Knowledge has limits as well. There’s only so much we can fit in our brains at once, and the amount of knowledge we can obtain is in sync with our time, energy and finances. Knowledge also ‘has a half-life’. Some things are tried-and-true, but most of what we know will likely be irrelevant a decade or so from now. Real knowledge is the principles and patterns beneath a skill that allow you to learn and relearn to your curious heart’s content.

If you are in school or have a full-time job like me, there are only a precious few hours we have to give.

But here’s the things: knowledge is a powerful currency that we (who are lucky enough) have access too. Knowledge is free. Yes, there’s paywalls and cliques and a dozen other obstacles and distractions (which I’ll get to in a second), but our interconnected lives have leveled the playing field. There are truck-loads of knowledge out there online. A few ads later and you can watch how to build a business on YouTube. Through podcasting and TED talks, you can listen to conversations with the smartest people on the planet. We are all a few clicks away from learning anything we ever wanted to learn.

Knowledge is a powerful currency that levels the playing field.

And that’s me only thinking about individuals. When we create connections with likeminded people and/or build teams dedicated to building something purposeful, our knowledge currency multiples.

But. (And this is a doozie.)

In order to cultivate more knowledge, we have to stay focused and put away our distractions as much as we can. There’s a lot of people out there who are highly skilled at a lot of things that don’t add up too much. Not that being highly skilled is what life’s all about. (Some of the best things in life can’t be created by achieving.) But the question is, are your distractions owning your life?

You have the power to learn anything.

Now you just have to put in the time.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner | Daily Blog #863

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Being self-made is overrated

“Every successful individual knows that his or her achievement depends on a community of persons working together.”

Paul Ryan

The problem, or perhaps the privilege, of being born is that we come into this world with a mental blank slate. Sure, we’ve got our innate basic instincts, our DNA and our own unique character traits. But we don’t know what we got ourselves into being by born.

We don’t come out of the womb knowing how to use a spoon, or drive a car, or how to look up questions on Google. Which means every kid born today (just like we did) has to start from scratch to learn the ABC’s of life. With so much going on nowadays, it’s easy for me to forget that in one point in my life I didn’t know how to tie my shoes, and riding a bike was a riddle wrapped in an enigma.

There’s a small bit of pride we should take from coming so far in life. Not that knowing how to use a spoon makes us unique, but our capacity to learn, and learn a lot relatively* quickly is a powerful thing and interesting to think about. (*human to humans anyway. Computers have us beat.)

Knowledge is passed down to new generations through teaching (verbally or written). To make things more complicated, knowledge is not distributed equally. Natural silos obscure and diffuse information from being easily accessed. Why weren’t we all taught how to eat healthy or how to invest in the stock market? Well, because not all of those who came before us (some being our parents) knew how to do those. Some did, some didn’t. (That would be a great one sentence history book of humanity: Some did, some didn’t.)

A wealthy family might know, but perhaps you weren’t born into a wealthy family. Or a grandmother might be able ‘to teach you a thing or two about nutrition’… the problem is she wasn’t your grandma, she was someone else’s. Essentially: We have to RELEARN EVERYTHING for ourselves.

There’s great value for learning and doing things yourself. Initiative is hard to teach. You’ve gotta want the vision for your life so badly that you’d give all your time, energy and attention towards achieving it.

Being self-made is rewarding, but it’s also lonely. It gives you creativity, clever thinking skills and resiliency, but without friends to share it with, what’s the point? I think we can have it both ways. We can pursue the things we love, be independent while also be willing to work better with others.

Be self-made, together.

We can go much further with like minded individuals who got our backs and want us to succeed then we can go it alone.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner | Daily Blog #691

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Reading Muscles

Saying ‘I hate reading’ is like saying ‘I hate green foods’. You probably don’t know if you like it because you’ve barely tried it. You might still think broccoli taste awful, but maybe you or your family just sucks at making broccoli and are great at overcooking it. (Sorry mom, I didn’t mean it)

The biggest problem with reading is that people don’t tell you why you should read in the first place.

Reading is A straight path toward success. 

(Whatever success means to you. It could mean swimming in a hot tub full of money, or maybe just having flexible work hours) If you want to succeed, if you want to be more than a beginner, and if you seek change and have a desire to live an extraordinary life — start reading. 

Knowledge, Skills, the ability to learn and connect ideas is a surefire way to become a linchpin.

Reading opens up your mind to infinite ideas and possibilities. (Put that on a motivational poster and smoke it) Reading expands your ability to think and see, it wakes you up to new worlds and new perspectives on life. (And that goes for fiction and nonfiction too)

I can’t even count the number of ideas reading has sparked for me. Half of my writing ideas were prompted by a word or phrase that I️ read in a book. And that’s the crazy things about books: they are a summation of experience, expertise, and ideas. Ideas that can change your life, and the lives of thousands of people out there facing their own challenges.

It’s okay if you don’t quite understand a book. When did not understanding become a sign that your an idiot?! Not understanding simply means you haven’t understood it yet. 

How to Build Up Your Reading Muscles

The act of reading a book is like going to the gym. Each time you do I­t­ you’re working your reading muscles and getting mentally stronger. Reading The Count of Monty Christo is going to feel like you’re jogging through pudding compared to reading The Hunger Games. And reading Plato is going to feel like someone strap hippos to your feet compared to reading Make Good Art. (Both fantastic, but Neil Gaiman’s Make Good Art is much easy to understand than Plato) You don’t start working out by going to the gym and bench pressing 400 lbs on your first go. You start gradually and work you’re way up.

Each time you read new a book, pick something that feels like I­t­ might be a little out of your comfort zone. 

Read EVERYTHING that interests you, and be open to new genres that might not. Ideas can come from anywhere. It’s okay to put a book down if you dislike I­t­, but never put a book down because you /think/ that you would dislike I­t­.

I­t­ bears repeating, reading is your path to success. Whatever you want to learn, whoever you want to be, there’s a book out there for you to help guide your way. Mastery begins with the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom.

Get reading.

Stay BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner

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Related Insights

“The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading.” — David Bailey

“There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.” — Will Rogers

“Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.” — Mark Haddon

Wisdom of the Ages (An Introduction)

“Knowledge is the food of the soul.” – Plato –

There is a force that exists in the world that has gone by many names.

It’s pure knowledge —

It’s insight and understanding —

It’s an accumulation of thought and experience — most of which has existed before we we’re even born.

It lives, it breathes.

I call it The Wisdom of the Ages.

And we can use it to pursue excellence and develop mastery.

In this day and age of the internet and our globally connected lives, we all have the power of The Wisdom of the Ages within our grasp — literally. Pull out your phone and with a few mindful taps, you can be plugged into knowledge from the smartest minds on the planet — whether they live today, or died centuries ago — and whether you know them personally or not. 

The insights you’re searching for, most likely already exists. It’s the wisdom of every life that came before you. Not all of it is truth, mind you, but it’s up to us to separate the wheat from the chaff. The best way to use this wisdom to our advantage is to study and apply it to our own life – keeping what works, removing what doesn’t. Experimenting our way to our own strategy, by learning from the best.

What is learning but gaining and sharpening useful information to apply to our own life?

What is teaching but distilling what you have learned, experienced and have been taught yourself? to greenhorns. to the misinformed. to the unknowledged.

To teach, you must learn, and to learn you, must be open to new realities.

“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.” – Bill Nye – 

The Wisdom of the Ages is in our hands. It’s up to us to take advantage of its power, use it to improve our life and the lives around us, and give back by adding value to its supply. 

You’ve know about The Wisdom of the Ages your entire life – now it has a name. And names have power.

The question that remains is, “How do we start to take advantage of this power?”

The first step is curiosity…