Once, maybe twice per year, I come across an idea that completely rewires my brain.
This often comes in the form of a book.
I’ve heard Ryan Holiday refer to this as a “quake book” – one that causes a metaphysical earthquake that shatters your worldview.
Some of my quake books over the years include:
Each of these books made me question everything I thought I knew. Reading them was like being launched into space while on acid. I had to spend weeks afterward integrating and gradually forming a new perspective on the world.
Such is the power of an idea…
Recently, I was listening to the
podcast and picked up on a few simple sentences that grabbed me in the same way:"Most people don’t understand what learning is. Learning is not memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior."
– David Senra
I didn’t think much of it at first.
Then it hit me:
Over the last decade, I have accumulated a large volume of information in my head – but only turned a small fraction of it into concrete improvements in my life.
Not only that, I see almost everyone around me making the same mistake.
At a societal level, we mistake learning for consuming and memorizing information. We forget that the only real utility of new information is to reshape and improve our reality.
The result is endless consumption of information without any action.
Dan Koe talks about this as information bloat:
Weight gain happens when you consume calories without moving your body. Similarly, when you consume information without using it to fuel action, you end up with a bunch of extra “information calories” in your head. Eventually, they start taking up significant space and weighing you down.
The Information Diet
Information is transformed into learning only when you live its truth, i.e. when you fully embody theory in practice.
It is one thing to know about musical theory. It is another to be able to feel – as you are playing an instrument – that a major-7 chord is precisely what is needed to move the song in the right direction.
The former is knowing of. The latter is just knowing, which is the same thing as the ability to engage in a new behavior.
To build a lean and healthy body, you want to eat enough calories. But you never want to eat more calories than you need, especially not on a regular basis.
Similarly, consuming the right amount of information is crucial. You need information to act on. But consume too much and you’ll be handicapped by complexity and inaction.
You want the exact right amount of information and no more.
But what is the right amount of information?
The indiepreneur Pieter Levels has an approach to this that I like (ironically, I read about it in his book Make).
He suggests that if you want to build a website, for example, you should not start by reading volumes on HTML, CSS, Javascript, Databases, etc.
Instead, try to do it by googling (or GPT-ing) each step you don’t know how to do, starting with the first step. So, if you’re a complete noob, you will probably need to look up literally every step of the way.
The point is, instead of consuming information, you JUST START BUILDING and only consume more information when you need it to solve a specific problem.
It’s like eating only when you are hungry.
It’s actually liberating to realize how little information (importantly, the right information) is required to fuel effective action.
Let’s take weight loss as an example.
Most people debate whether you should or shouldn’t count calories, whether you should eat high-carb or high-fat etc. (I know, I’ve been there). They read all the books and follow all the social media accounts. But when they step on the scales, the dial ain’t going nowhere…
Instead, imagine for a moment you came to me for weight loss advice, without knowing any information about the subject.
The only thing you have is an extreme bias toward action.
I could then tell you to do just two simple things:
Eat your body weight (lbs) in grams of protein every day
Hit 10k steps per day
That’s it.
Do this for a month and I guarantee you’ll see 10x the results of all those people debating online – no more information needed.
“But oh, it’s so much more complicated than that”, says @karen245.
Yes.
But it doesn’t matter, because you don’t need more information than you will actually act on.
Now, let’s assume you do this for a couple of months, achieve great results, and then hit a plateau.
I could then feed you two additional pieces of information, such as:
Cook 80+% of your food at home
Wake up at the same time each day
You start acting on those and voila, you reach the next level.
This is how all endeavors work.
Change Is Painful
In the human brain, change equals risk. And risk causes real stress.
The problem is, any type of progress inherently means change.
To avoid the pain of change, we often seek comfort in more information. It makes us feel like we are making progress when we are not.
In fact, a great heuristic is this:
If you aren’t experiencing pain and discomfort, you are not moving closer to your goals. Period.
I’ve written before that what sets people apart is not intelligence but action despite the pain associated with change.
Think of the genesis scene in any superhero movie, when the protagonist gets bitten by the radioactive spider or injected with a special serum or whatever (I don’t know my superheroes very well).
The transformation is always painful, but they come out of it with superpowers.
You can too.
Take Action
Now that you have absorbed all the information laid out here, it’s time to translate it into a change in your reality:
Realize that the information:action ratio needed to do the thing you want to do is probably much lower than you think.
Have a bias toward action and seek information only to find a solution to a specific problem (“eat” when you’re hungry)
Focus on quality of information, not quantity
If you’re used to accumulating information, building a habit of action will be difficult at first. Again, it is very similar to fitness, where exercise comes easy to those who have worked up a tolerance for pain but is extremely hard for those who have fallen out of the habit.
That’s alright.
Just start with small actions, stay consistent, and watch your reality transform.