KNOWLEDGE IS NOT POWER!
“Knowledge is only potential power. It becomes power only when, and if, it is organized into definite plans of action, and directed to a definite end,” wrote Napoleon Hill 100 years back in his book “Think and Grow Rich,” and incidentally that was the very first book that I read more than 40 years ago when I was in 10th grade.
This quote has been changed by some recent motivational speakers like Tony Robbins to “Knowledge is not power. Knowledge is only potential power. Action is power.” Another version, that I don’t remember who said, is “Knowledge is potential power, it becomes power when you take action.”
The irony is that most of us know this is true yet how many of us actually take actions. What we actually do is, we start accumulating knowledge. We learn something and get really interested in the results we think the information can produce for us. In pursuing the results, we often confuse it with getting more information so we end up gathering and accumulating tons of information and knowledge without producing the results we wanted in the first place.
In this information age knowledge is freely available to everyone, quite literally at the push of a button, the difference is what we do with what we know. To create results in our life the most valuable resource that is available to us is our ability to take action.
There is a big difference between knowing what to do and doing what we know. Most people know what to do to be able to make their lives work but knowing just isn’t enough — we must act and use what we know. Something intangible happens when we take action on an idea. We set in motion a series of events, events that we don’t always know the full consequences of. Like throwing a stone in a pond, the ripple effect of the water affects the whole pond and moves everything that is in or on the pond. This illustrates how a single action can have a significant impact even if we aren’t always aware of it. On a more practical and tangible level we start getting feedback from our actions and learn things that we can only learn as a result of our actions.
An action always produces a result. When we take action, we bring an idea into effect and you use our will to do something to achieve a specific purpose. When we do this we actually create in the true sense of the words “turn an idea into reality;” we express something that was internal on the outside. Every action is a cause set in motion, and for every cause there is an effect, and it is the effects or results that we are all really interested in. We don’t want to know that we can be successful. We want to experience it by seeing and touching it and the real satisfaction comes from turning our ideas into reality.