Learning without Action
"The great aim of education is not knowledge but action." Herbert Spencer
Procrastination. All of us are guilty of it.
That guilt makes us feel bad. Our brain realizes this and has become very skilled at helping us numb that sensation.
With the amount of information that is available, many of us indulge in a form of procrastination that involves 'over-learning. I know this is something that I have been guilty of doing many times.
The pattern is similar every time:
I am interested in learning about a particular topic or space. Let's say adding a deeper layer of product analytics into our stack to track how our users are using our product.
It starts with my looking into resources which could range from books, videos and articles. The rabbit hole deepens, and we begin to learn about data warehousing and other potential solutions we may need to research.
Soon we are researching tangential tooling that we may need when our userbase increases, which leads us deeper and deeper into the complexities that come with scale.
We begin to reach out to people who have implemented similar layers into their product stack and get various tools and options that we can pursue. Each of them comes with its learning curve that we get curious about and explore.
What started as a simple question has become a web of resources that paralyzed us from making any decision. We decide to revisit this topic later when we have more time and resources.
I have lost count as to how many times I have fallen into this procrastination trap. The deal is that it doesn't feel like procrastination. We are reading and learning, which feels like making progress.
In the end, we can learn all we want. If we fail to take action with our knowledge, we will achieve very little in life. In our quest to decide how committed we want to be to something holds us back from ever taking that next step.
In closing, this Steve Jobs quote is quite relevant:
"Most people never pick up the phone. Most people never call and ask. And that's what separates sometimes the people who do things from those who just dream about them. You gotta act. You gotta be willing to fail. You gotta be willing to crash and burn. With people on the phone or starting a company, if you're afraid you'll fail, you won't get very far."