SLL#04: Knowledge Rifts

The Optimal Use of Knowledge

Beginning.

When I was very young, maybe seven or eight years old, all I ever wanted was a dictionary.

Most kids my age wanted the latest games, toys, and stuff, but all I wanted was a book that could tell me the meaning of the strange words I kept encountering whenever I opened a book meant for adults.

I was brought up by parents who believe the most important thing is learning. My dad believes when children have fun, they grow up stupid and since he believes learning is NOT fun, he wants all his children to learn as much as possible.

Well, the joke’s on him because I fell in love with learning and it was fun. I loved to read and spent most of my spare time reading books that were too big for me.

I soon outgrew books meant for my age grade and to satisfy my endless thirst, I began to poke into my dad’s library of books (which in retrospect, I doubt he’s ever read any of them.)

I was curious, I wanted to know the meaning of the words in those books, but neither my dad nor my mom had a dictionary. In fact, I wasn’t even aware of what a dictionary was.

I can’t remember how I eventually found out there was such a thing as a dictionary, but when I did find out, it was all I could think of.

So I begged my dad to buy me one. I begged and begged until one day, he took me to the bookshop and showed me the different types of dictionaries for sale and refused to buy any because “he didn’t have enough money” to buy me one.

I cried.

He eventually bought me a dictionary though. Three or four years later when I resumed secondary school because it was part of the compulsory recommended books by the school.

I later realized that my dad didn't buy me the dictionary earlier because he thought I was going to have fun with it, but since my new school was recommending it and in his mind, school can’t be fun, he didn’t hesitate to buy me one.

Again, the joke’s on him, because school was fun for me.

I loved finding out new things, even before I had access to the internet. A game changer for me was finding out about a collection of beautiful encyclopedias in the school library about every subject imaginable.

I was content to sit for as long as I could absorbing knowledge from them— those were wonderful times. Of course, when I seem to know what my peers don’t, they’ll look at me with wonder. They could only imagine the effort it took to find out about the things I know, and some of them respected me for it, others were jealous and some just dismissed me as a nerd.

When I became aware of the internet, it was another mind-blowing moment for me. At this point, most of my peers already have access to the internet. They had phones that could connect to the internet— this was way before 3G networks!

I knew my parents would never buy me such a phone. But that didn’t stop me from trying to convince them.

I remember those days when I saved money to go to the cybercafe after school to use the computer and browse the internet. Good times.

I had access to my first internet-enabled phone when my dad accidentally broke his phone, by driving over it. Don’t ask me how it happened because he was confused himself.

He took one look at the broken phone and discarded it, then he bought a new one. I took the broken phone, fixed it, and started using it.

I was in awe. I could Google anything I wanted, and learn about any topic I could imagine, all in the comfort of my home!

The plot twist in this story is this: since acquiring knowledge has become too easy, it lost its appeal for me.

What’s the point of knowing a thousand things when you can easily retrieve knowledge with just a few taps of a button?

Deep Dive.

The invention of writing was a major turning point in human history. It was the beginning of an era where thoughts and ideas could be stored, retrieved, and even shared. Initially, writing and reading were regarded as sacred activities reserved for the elite and it took several centuries later after its invention before the common man could access it.

We in the modern 21st Century might not fully appreciate the fact that we are living in truly magical times where it has become too easy to access knowledge.

With just a few clicks, we can pull out information on any subject in a matter of seconds.

Napoleon Hill once wrote a story about Henry Ford, the inventor of what would become the modern automobile and the car assembly line. In the story, Ford, an uneducated man was being ridiculed for his lack of knowledge about certain things, and in response, the inventor angrily said something to the effect of: “Why do I need to memorize these useless facts when I can employ someone who can and have them tell me?”

Ford was regarded as uneducated because he didn’t finish high school, but he was able to achieve what many university degree holders could not, he was capable of complex thoughts and was able to devise solutions that didn’t even cross the minds of many professors.

How did he do it?

I don’t know, but I can speculate.

The Disadvantage of Knowing Too Much

Knowledge is the awareness of information.

The human brain is not designed to hold too much information, that is why we forget things. We forget things because our brains actively delete useless information that we don’t need.

If a piece of information is very important to you, you won’t forget it. Our ancestors remembered how to hunt, the footprints of predators, the safe paths through the jungle, how to make fire, and the poisonous berries to avoid eating. These pieces of information are very crucial for survival, forgetting any or all of them is an invitation to death.

Our ancestors only remembered the important things and forgot what did not serve the purpose of their survival. Nowadays, our minds are bombarded daily with so much information that the side effect is that we tend to forget important things.

There are stories on the internet of ambitious people who go to extreme lengths to test the limits of their memories by memorizing encyclopedias, religious texts, and academic materials. These people might feel good as if they have achieved something worthwhile but the reality is that the act of forcing so much useless information into their brains will ensure they forget something else and they might not realize what that thing is until it’s too late.

The optimal use of the brain is to store important, useful information that is necessary for one’s work or role in society, every other information can be held in the minds of other people based on their work or role in society.

Civilization happens when humans come together to share different bodies of information and use it to achieve a common goal.

We can’t all be lawyers, engineers, doctors, or computer programmers, but we can all work together on a common goal. This is the beauty of knowledge and the advantage our species has over every other species on the planet.

This was how I imagined Henry Ford was able to come up with his inventions: he only focused on what he knew and was very aware of what he didn't know. The next step is to look for people who know what he doesn’t and work with them… As far as car manufacturing is concerned. This is applicable in any field of endeavor.

Trying to know everything is an invitation to a turbulent mind, a mind filled with knowledge that cannot be utilized due to limited capacity to act.

The Knowledge Rift Theory

This states that, for everything you know about a given subject, there are a thousand other things you possibly don’t know.

Human beings generally don’t like to be ignorant, that is why we invented books, dictionaries, the internet, and artificial intelligence. We want to fill every available knowledge rift, we want to know all that there is to know.

Scientists keep discovering new information and documenting them, researchers keep tinkering with the considerably large bodies of knowledge already in existence in an attempt to find new things and develop new bodies of knowledge.

The knowledge rift ensures that the more we know, the more we realize how little we know which increases our desire to know more, which in turn makes us realize how little we know.

It is a frustrating condition, an ever-expanding rift.

The Optimal Use of Knowledge

Knowledge is useless unless it can be applied.

Knowledge is not meant to be accumulated just to decorate the mind, it is meant for useful things like the progress of humanity. There is no point in expanding the knowledge rift for nothing.

The optimal use of knowledge is to acquire knowledge that is useful for one’s personal progress and well-being and allows for the possibility that others would do the same.

Knowing more things does not make you better than the next person, because there is always something you don’t know which the next person does.

The famous psychologist, Jordan Peterson advised in his bestselling book, The 12 Rules of Life, specifically rule 9 to always assume the person you are speaking to knows something you don’t.

This assumption is a healthy one because it gives you an opportunity to learn from others. If you live life with this approach, you will be surprised at the amount of information you can get just by listening to other people speak.

The Smartest Guy In the Room

There is this famous, (almost cliched) saying that states: “If you are the smartest person in a room, you are in the wrong room.”

This saying is true because being the smartest person among any group of people is not an optimal use of knowledge. A person who surrounds themselves with people they cannot learn from is not smart at all.

Truly smart people look for other smart people to share knowledge and information with.

Reversal.

The Way of the Genius

A true genius is someone who has mastered the optimal use of knowledge or information. This person learns only what is useful and necessary for their current goals and objectives.

However, there are rare cases of incredible individuals with brains designed to hold and process more information than the average person. For these people, the usual rules of knowledge optimization do not apply.

I can’t imagine Elon Musk easily finding a group of people smarter than he is. This is a man who thinks of things that only cross the imagination of the craziest science fiction writers and brings them to reality.

Elon Musk taught himself all the skills required to build rockets and electric cars, he taught himself physics and engineering just from reading books. The rate at which his mind absorbs and processes information is so great that he once declared: “My mind is a storm.”

Can you imagine how painful it is to have a turbulent mind? But Elon is a unique individual because he was able to utilize his knowledge— this does not make it less painful.

Elon Musk’s genius is a blessing and a curse, if your mind is normal, you should be grateful.

Synthesis

We can’t all be like Elon Musk but that does not mean we cannot achieve his feats. The key is to utilize every advantage we have in this 21st Century.

We have the internet that provides access to vast bodies of knowledge about anything we want to know. We have Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can think for us. All that is required is focus and willingness to act on acquired knowledge to transform it into tangible results in the world.

Knowing things just for knowing sake is a waste of potential. Dan Koe once advised us to embark on meaningful projects and find the required information to execute them. This is optimal learning. Learning to build.

With AI and the internet, it is much easier to build meaningful projects, all it takes is enough motivation and focus.

An average person today can find out a pressing problem in society or in his life and set out to solve that problem by finding out the required resources and information needed to solve it, utilizing AI to do the heavy thinking for him, and execute it.

Naval Ravikant once compared the power of AI to an Army of Robots, not in the doomsday sense, but an army that can do your bidding, all they need is a skilled general. You.

Conclusion

To optimize your mind, only seek out useful knowledge that can solve your pressing problems or that is relevant to your current situation. Knowing the dates of birth and heights of all the previous American presidents is a waste of mental resources unless you want to write a history book about American politics.

We live in truly magical times where learning new stuff is as easy as tapping a screen. You are finding it difficult to learn new things because you are distracted. Become aware of what you don’t know and you can easily find a way to fill that gap either by seeking out people who have that information or just using technology to find it out on your own.

The Knowledge Rift expands the more we try to fill it, but our goal should not be filling it. Our goal should be to use our knowledge to build and create useful things that benefit us and others.

Thank you for Reading.

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