The Curse of Knowledge Work

Learning has an insidious trap

I love learning.

It is literally my job to learn things and I do well at my job. However, there is an insidious trap waiting for us as knowledge workers and we rarely see it.

Recently I decided to take a break from one of my favorite activities, listening to podcasts. Its all part of a new plan to avoid the trap and to make progress in my life.

Lets start at the beginning.

I grew up in a school where being smart was looked down upon. "Book learning" wasn't much use if you couldn't use it to build a fence or ride a horse. I still had friends, but it was clear that they valued learning that manifested itself in physical work over the mental and digital world.

Their lives took them into heavy machinery operation and pipelines, mine went into software. I still go back and visit, hang and joke with them. We all made the right choices and we still give each other crap about those choices. 😁

However, there is a problem with knowledge work that my friends were able to see in middle and high school that has taken me years to see. They couldn't articulate it at the time but their simple heuristic that knowledge had to manifest itself in the physical world solved for it.

The problem is this:

The pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge is unbounded.

There is no natural filter to our learning, if some knowledge is good, more knowledge is better.

If one book on management is good, then 5 is better. We read, read, read and listen, listen listen. Trying to stay ahead of the game and build a base of knowledge to hedge against the future.

I remember a twitter bro who wrote a whole thread about how to read 100 books in a year. I asked why not read one book and apply it. He hadn’t considered that. The idea of applying the knowledge wasn’t built into the program, it was just about having it. I think he assumed that the application was the easy part, that it would just happen if he knew enough.

Knowledge workers like him can get into a state where they stop asking why. If its information, they should know it. So they soldier on and develop an addiction to learning and information. Yet, the amount of information available is ballooning out of control and our ability to retain information is diminishing. With so much available we can learn for 1000 years without ever applying a single idea.

The physical world works in the inverse. Application has to be first. You do to learn. That’s why my friends were so frustrated sitting in desks learning from books, it was the inverse of how people actually learn in the physical world and their filter caught it immediately. They laughed and joked about this inverse of the natural world and they poked fun at the people like me who embraced it.

Who was right? Is it better to do first or should we constantly be filling up our minds with information?

The answer, as is the case 99% of the time, is somewhere in the middle. Watching 1000 hours of wilderness survival videos wont make you a much better survivor if you never spend a night outside. But if you are in the wilderness and struggling to survive, you can gain some valuable insight from other people that might keep you alive.

The pursuit of knowledge being unbounded is the first issue, but its not the insidious trap. The trap is so much sneakier.

The pursuit of knowledge becomes a coping mechanism to distract us from our real problems.

Very few people want to face their own issues and work through them. We all have problems and we don’t want to face some of those problems, let alone start solving them. So we drown out our mind with learning.

Doing the dishes, podcast.

Driving in the car, podcast.

Sitting on the toilet, Youtube.

We trick ourselves into thinking that we are redeeming the time and in a way we are. But if we don’t ever turn off the firehose of information and deal with what we have got, we are not going to make progress on the real issues. We will feel good because we will be learning so much, but we wont see change because we dont take the time to execute on the things we are learning.

We avoid the areas of our life that we need to focus on by cranking up the knowledge. We stream 1000s of the best ideas into our heads and think there is no way we will fail if we have the best ideas.

But we are disconnected from the physical world. We have forgotten that you have to “do” to learn. Sure some ideas lay dormant and come back to life on occasion but the return on investment is low.

Which brings me to my decision to shut the hose off and delete my podcast app. I realized that I had replaced my own thoughts with the thoughts of other people. I was sacrificing observation, reflection and reinforcement of what I had already learned for information and ideas. It seemed entirely possible that while I was learning more, I was actually getting worse. I was getting rusty at the very basics that I spend my time writing about.

So I shut off the outside. Not permanently. I still have audio books. There is still also a time for learning. But I am starting with action, observation, reflection and the deep internal work. Then I am moving to learning.

I’m early in the experiment. Time will tell.

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