Knowledge can be power

While reading the book “The 12 Week Year“, this headline stood out to me: knowledge can be power. I’ll let the authors start by explaining it:

You’ve no doubt heard the saying knowledge is power. I disagree. Knowledge is only powerful if you use it, if you act on it. People spend lifetimes acquiring knowledge, but to what purpose? Knowledge alone benefits no one unless the person acquiring it does something with it.

I work hard to acquire more knowledge, but I think I fall a little flat when it comes to this. Having knowledge is great, but executing based on that knowledge is where it really matters.

This book is a fantastic example of this. The book gives a framework for organizing your life and business into 12 week sections (essentially quarterly plans) and it’s a good way to do things. We run our business on EOS, which is quite similar.

Learning about how to run a company this way is good, and that knowledge can be a bit helpful. To really get more out of it, though, you need to actually implement their ideas. This goes for EOS, for The 12 Week Year, or for anything you might learn. If you learn but never execute on your ideas, the learning and knowledge is of no real value.

I read a lot of books and pick up tons of new ideas, but a big push lately is for me to find more ways to make use of those ideas. If nothing else, I like to bundle up some of the ideas I come across, share them with our team, and see if any make sense for us to try.

One way or another, once you’ve put new ideas in your head, do your best to try to get them back out and use them or you’re really just wasting your time.