Living what you learn
Inertia — Nº191
There’s a quiet satisfaction we tend to find with new knowledge. That’s what makes it one of the best and most humbling things out there. In practice, it’s even better. But we’ve all been there: reading a five-star book, nodding along with every word, convinced that, this time, we’ll make lasting change. The ideas seem crystal clear. The benefits are obvious. The path is straightforward. But one of the hardest things in life is practising what we’ve learned when we need it. As life throws its inevitable curveballs—a stressful deadline, an argument with our amor, or simply a moment of weakness—we can find ourselves falling back into old patterns as if nothing else had ever crossed our minds.
It isn’t a story of failure. Rather, such a fundamentally human experience connects us to those around us and those from before. History is so interconnected because human nature has hardly changed.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.
— James Baldwin, 1963
Just as literature helps us understand our struggles are universal, it also notes that we tend to know the way through our problems, yet we struggle to walk them. We can recognise our flaws pretty quickly, yet we would still battle to overcome them. The gap between living what we learn isn’t just a modern ailment born from self-help books and productivity apps—it’s a timeless consideration of the human condition.
The truth is always that knowledge alone is not enough. It just leaves you halfway. Some people like to mistake knowledge for progress, believing just one more time will finally make them change. But then the knowledge-action gap unveils itself, showing the growing distance between what we learn and what we live.
For example, knowing how to get in shape is relatively simple. The information isn’t complicated because we’ve been doing it well for centuries. We walk, climb stairs, lift, twist, and bend as part of our daily routine. We eat food with fewer ingredients. We sleep well and we learn our locus of control. Yet there’s an epidemic in all these areas—not because people lack information, but because they don’t continue to apply what they already know.
There’s a correlation between time and willingness to act, but the causation comes down to you. Understanding what someone is saying is step one. Even then, intelligence sometimes works against you because you treat understanding as the end, not the beginning. But real change happens with your hands and voice, not just what’s in your head.