Know better, do better.
While I often say knowing isn't doing, that doesn't mean we can't improve ourselves through knowing more today than we did yesterday. We'd still have to apply what we learn, but intentional learning not only covers the knowledge component that we hold in our head, but also the practical knowledge we acquire through physical application. Yet, even with all the avenues we have to gain knowledge, we tend not to use them effectively, or at all.
There is the often quoted (but rarely understood) idea of 10,000 hours to be exceptional at a skill. But if you consider that if you spent an hour a day practicing something it would take you almost thirty years to be exception. What this indicates is that we can't be exceptional at many things.
That is not quite the case.
Because "exceptional" really just means better than average and since most people aren't going to put any practice into most things, it is possible to be better than average in many things. However, better than average might be at the bottom end of the scale for those who actually focus their attention and energy on being very good at that skill. But, that doesn't matter, unless needing to compete against them in that narrow frame.
What is more important than being the best at something though, is being good at the things that matter to us as individuals, because that is going to affect our experience and potential to do what we find meaning in. Some of the skills might be work or career related so we are able to trade value for income and then buy what supports our personal life. And some of the skills might be personal where we want to be good at a specific activity. Yet, between these are other skills that often fall between the gaps or are ignored like, dealing with people, resiliency in the face of adversity, or having the energy to move as required.
Yet these areas are relatively easy to develop and we don't have to be professional conflict negotiators, Navy Seals, or the fittest human on earth in order to do what we need to do in our own lives. We can improve a lot quickly in so many supportive skills by turning our attention to learning and practicing them often and intensely for a short time and then building up repetitive mechanisms that make them habitual.
Not only does this develop the skill, it also gives us the base understanding and the experience to discover if it is an area we want to develop further and put more focus upon, or only get it up to a "good enough" level and move on to the next skill. To do this though, we have to put enough effort in for long enough, to raise the level to where we are able to make a qualified judgement. And this can be hard at rimes, because it means pushing through the barrier of not being very good at something, that might also not be very interesting.
For example, over the years I have worked with many people who profess that they are "not good with people" in social situations, and aren't really interested in people. Often, they themselves have been relatively technical and process orientated as engineers and while very good at what they do, struggle to get their points of view across and influence direction. What I remind them of is that people are pretty predictable, which means that it is possible to learn the process of effective communication for impact and influence. They don't have to be interested in people, they just have to leverage their interest in the process of people in the same way they might be interested in the process of a machine or computer programme.
And this is the same for pretty much learning any skill as the process of learning doesn't differ that much. A big part of what we need to do in order to be able to push through, is find the pieces that are interesting to us and reframe the uninteresting or uncomfortable parts toward something that we are comfortable with, as well as connecting it to a part of the outcome we desire. Discomfort isn't a negative, it is a necessary factor for growth.
Knowing isn't enough.
We also need to apply what we know in order to develop our skillset. This means that whatever we learn and want to be able to apply, we have to turn that knowledge into an actionable movement. It might not just be physical practice, for instance with the understanding people it might be learning about various patterns and then going out looking to observe them happen. After that, it might be learning how to affect that pattern and then going out and experimenting with the techniques.
Regardless of what skills we want though, we have to accept that we are unable to learn everything we want, so we will have to whittle down the list to the things that we need first. The reason is that needs should always come before wants and when this happens, there normally ends up being more bandwidth and resources to fulfil wants anyway.
Get what is needed out of the way first, to have room to focus on what is wanted.
But we often get this backwards, leaving too few resources for what we need, which will ultimately impact on our ability to meet the requirements of what we want. Doing this means our attention, the most valuable resource we have,* often gets pushed into areas of high resource consumption with low personal reward activities that "feel good" but don't provide what we need. The easiest example is how often people say, "I don't have the time" while they spend several hours per day watching streaming content.
High resource, low reward activity.
And most people know that they are paying attention to areas that don't improve their lives, but like addicts, can't seem to pull themselves back and spend their resources on what matters.
What do you need?
What do you need to know and do to fulfil your needs?
Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]
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