It’s Not A Lack Of Knowledge Holding You Back…It’s This
The Amplified Impact Podcast
April 22nd, 2023
In today’s episode, I want to confess something: I used to have a bit of a reading problem.
I would read hundreds of books a year, just to feel productive and gather knowledge… But over time, I realized that it’s not a lack of information that holds us back in life, it’s a lack of execution.
We can easily fall into the trap of feeling productive when we’re just gathering information, instead of taking action.
I want to share with you the importance of maintaining a healthy ratio between doing and learning, and why it’s crucial if you want to make progress towards your goals.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“If you know that the path that you’re on right now cannot get you to the top, then you’re better off just making that decision as quickly as possible and just restarting.” – Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
All right. What is up? All you beautiful hyper-focused people. Welcome back to the podcast. Now here’s the truth. Uh, little confession time. I have a bit of a reading problem. I read a lot of books, or at least historically, I, I used to read a whole lot more. These days I try to read only the best things.
Instead of reading for quantity, I go for quality. I try to reread some of like the absolute best books that I’ve ever read that have had the biggest impact in my life. And I find that by going back and rereading things that. I, I get a very, I get a much deeper understanding of the content, of the materials, and just depending on where you are in your life, things hit differently when you read ’em.
And so I found it much more impactful in my own life in recent years to just go back and keep rereading the really classic, awesome books that have impacted me rather than just reading for quantity. Because in a previous life, let’s just say maybe rewind three to five years, I was reading literally hundreds of books a year.
I think the, the most that I read in a year was right around 140, which works out like to be almost three books a week. And if you break count down how many hours it takes to read a book, that means I was reading just a lot, like a lot, a lot, a lot. And if I’m being completely honest, like a lot of that was just born from the fact that one, I like reading.
Reading is a form of escapism. It’s the type of entertainment, it’s something that I’m really passionate about, but. Maybe a little bit more insidious was that I would use this knowledge gathering or this reading time as an excuse to feel productive, to say that I’m doing something. I’m gathering information that is going to serve me in the future.
And the truth of the matter is that it’s almost never been a lack of information that’s held me back in life. It’s not. It’s not that I don’t know what to do. It’s that I just don’t do what I know I should do. So it’s not a lack of information that’s holding me back. It’s a lack of execution and reading.
Whether you know it’s a book or it’s blogs, it’s Twitter, it’s watching YouTube videos, it’s listening to podcasts like this. I think we can very easily slide down this slippery. Of feeling productive when we’re gathering information or feeling like this is a necessary requisite step before you can start making meaningful progress towards your goals.
You need to go and research and collect data, and start planning and getting everything just right and just perfect. But the thing is, like most people that I know who are not where they want to be in, in life, it’s, it’s not because they don’t have the skills, the resources, the knowledge necessary to execute if they were just to start moving forward.
It’s just that they’re stuck at the crossroads of life between. This path, that path, this other path. And they’re trying to get the perfect vantage before, you know, perfect perspective point of like what lies ahead so that they can make the most informed decision before they actually start making progress.
But the truth is like the, the, the fork in the road immediately takes, uh, a bend and it goes around the corner and you can’t see it from where you’re standing. And no matter like how hard you look and how much you get up on your tippy toes, like you’re never gonna be able to see around that. The only thing that is going to allow you to know what is around that next corner is to just start moving forward, to physically change your vantage point, to start walking one of the paths.
And so if you’re in this place where you’re, you’re just collecting information for the sake of collecting it and feeling productive, I think the first step is to recognize that that’s what’s happening. And that’s what reading was for me for a very long time. It was. This illusion of productivity and this illusion that I was moving my life forward and things didn’t really start to change until I got to the point where the, the amount of doing I was doing every day was in far excess of how much I was reading or learning.
And I’m not saying that reading’s bad, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t be spending like a considerable amount of time each week learning, because that is one of the core habits that I think is necessary if you want to survive and thrive in this world. But it’s all about maintaining a healthy ratio between doing and learning.
And as soon as the learning starts to outweigh the doing, I think you have a problem. And it’s probably the reason why you’re not making progress towards your goals in the way that you would like to or at the speed that you would like to. So I share that all with you today because, um, it’s something that we can all easily fall into the trap of, like as when you’re moving into a new domain, a new area that is kind of unfamiliar, a little scary, we can.
And, and, and wait to start taking the actions necessary until we feel a little bit more confident and prepared. But the truth is like you’re, you’re never gonna fully feel confident and prepared regardless of like what you’re doing. If you’re moving into something that’s new and difficult, it will challenge you and it will feel overwhelming and you’ll never really feel ready for it.
And so my best piece of advice is just. Start doing start. Just pick a path and start going. Because you can always turn around. You can always come back on the path and take the other fork. Right. And that’s the thing I think a lot of people get confused about or like they forget, is that you don’t have to make a perfect decision.
You just have to make a decision and then continue continually update. The, the decision over time and say, okay, was the information that I had at the time when I made this initial decision, was it good? Was it solid? If it wasn’t, change the mental calculus. Go back and start over. And that’s totally possible.
But the, the, the problem is that a lot of people will get halfway up the mountain and then the path that they’re on will dead end. And instead of just going back to the. And starting again, finding a different path. They just decide to stay, stay where they are because they, they just can’t mental, uh, must have the mental energy necessary to.
Go back to the beginning and try again. And this is something that I think if you’re getting later on in years, you know, and I say later on, but like, if you’re in your thirties or forties and you’ve been working like a corporate America job, you’ve been going down a very particular path for a long time, and it’s no longer rewarding and fulfilling you in the way that you had hoped, and you’re not living the, the life of your dreams and it’s not everything that you, you could be, it could be very, very hard to go back down the mountain and start again.
If you know that the path that you’re on right now cannot get you to the top, then you’re better off just making that decision as quickly as possible and just restarting. And the thing is like we. We tend to overestimate how long it’s gonna take in the long view to get back to where we were. Um, so I think it was Bill Gates or Tony Robbins that said that we, we overestimate what we can accomplish in one year, but underestimate what we can accomplish in five.
And that’s tends to be true, is we get, we get these big eyes that think we can do so much in a short period of time, but then we have a really bad perspective of the long term and like, just how, how much you can accomplish if you put yourself to it for an extended period. Which has nothing to do with the topic of today’s podcast, which is just this, that the things that will hold you back in life are not a lack of information, it’s a lack of execution.
So get clear on what you’re not executing today, and then go do it. And that’ll do it for me. Guys, I’m psyched as always to have you here. You guys, seriously, you rock. If nobody’s told you that yet today, um, let me be the first one to tell you that you, you are a, a, a beautiful flower in a field. Oh, they’re beautiful flowers.
So I hope this brought you some value, guys. I’m looking forward to seeing you back here tomorrow. But until then, my friend stay hyperfocused.
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