There are people out there who know 10x what I know about copywriting and marketing yet don’t have half of what I do. Same there are people out there who could tell you everything that goes into building muscle from the molecular level on up (probably using that wrong) yet who are half my size. And so on and so forth. Same can be said about red pill knowledge and all of that. It’s one thing to understand a concept and a very different thing to implement a concept and understanding this difference is critical to your development.
I’ve talked with people before who were struggling in certain areas of their life and weren’t sure what to do. Sometimes it was about having a better dating life other times about growing a business and making it more profitable. 9 times out of 10 what it boiled down to is that they knew what they needed to do but they were putting off doing it in the hopes that something better and easier (a shortcut) would come along. I admit that this has happened to me plenty of times too.
Knowing Vs. Doing
We’ve all heard the hackneyed phrase that money is power and the equally hackneyed phrase “Only applied knowledge is power” for the longest time I figured this was something that everyone understood on an innate level. After all if someone handed you a gun and you went hunting with it, it’d be pretty obvious that you’ll only bag an animal if you pull the damn trigger. Yet when it comes to other things in life we hold this belief that simply having the knowledge is enough.
And while yes knowledge is a first step and can save you a lot of time you also need to take the second step of implementation. In a bit I’ll discuss where I differ from most who offer this advice. It’s the action that counts and it’s the action that will give you the feedback that you need to adjust and make the right changes. Knowledge alone is dead without also action behind it. Consider knowledge like gathering up a bunch of kindling, logs, and everything else that you need for a fire and actually lighting the fire would the action. Even a guy with a few logs and kindling’s fire will give off more warmth than a burning man sized bonfire if never lit.
Continuous Action & Learning
Here’s how you should look at this. First off you should have a constant flow of incoming true information (I’ll discuss what that means in a second) and then also constantly implementing what you learn. So it’s a process on input output. Not just constant input and not just constant output. The gurus seem to forget that there are plenty of hardworking people going absolutely nowhere in life and never will. Knowledge is essential and often overlooked. When I wrote The Primer something I recommended (and still do and always will do) is you should be reading at the very least a nonfiction book a month (I usually do 2-4 times this).
Something that all rich and successful people share (always a few exceptions, just like playing the lottery is a good idea for the few winners, doesn’t mean you should go out and do it though) is that they read a ton. Time for another cliche “readers are leaders” and also millionaires, winners, and people who get the most out of life. You have to read (consume real information) to get the most out of life. Also reading and gaining information can potentially save you a whole hell of a lot of your most valuable asset…time.
Where The Gurus Go Wrong
Alright so now let’s talk about where the gurus go wrong and what real information is. So I hear it a lot (especially on Twitter) that you need to stop consuming information and just start doing. And I agree with this…in a way and too an extent. Yes, you do need to start taking action on the information that you already know but if you stop consuming information you’re eventually going to stall out. Here’s another point where the gurus get confused. Despite popular belief we are not drowning in knowledge, at all. As a matter of fact we’re probably exposed to the least amount of knowledge than ever before.
But you say how can this be possible? After all with social media and technology and all that we’re exposed to more than ever before. And it’s true we are exposed more than ever before, but not to knowledge. What we are exposed to more than ever is noise not knowledge. All social media is, is noise. And since most gurus spend most their time on social media they confuse the little blips of noise for real information thus deducing that we’re overburdened with knowledge and just need to start working.
Summary
But the truth is we’re starving for real knowledge (like the kind found in books that you sit down alone and read) and drowning in noise and nonsense. So I agree with the gurus we all could use less noise in our life and don’t need anymore noise to get started going where we need to go. But I disagree that you don’t need to consume any more knowledge at all. Remember input/output that’s how it works. Consume and take action and repeat forevermore. Just input won’t work but just output won’t work either.
If you have any questions you would like to see answered in a future post send them to me at charlessledge001 (at) gmail (dot) com. If you found value in this post then I would encourage you to share this site with someone who may need it as well as check out my books here. I appreciate it. You can follow me on Twitter here.
-Charles Sledge
