Since I’m writing a book on how to know what you know, I thought I’d treat you to some thoughts about what is knowing, and what is not. In Western culture, many human survival strategies masquerade as knowing. Today I’m starting a limited series to compare alternatives to true knowing.
Showing up at the costume party of humanity dressed as knowing are:
- Thinking
- Remembering
- Worry
- Doubt
- Fear
- Shoulda Woulda Coulda
Let’s take this one by one:
Today’s less effective strategy for living than knowing is thinking.
What’s that you ask? How could thinking be an ineffective human strategy? Surely our ability to think separates us from “mere” animals? Surely it’s our most important quality?
Well, what if it isn’t? What if knowing is even more important than thinking? (and stop calling me Shirley)
Thinking is not the same as Knowing
I now confess that thinking is, indeed, an incredibly important quality of human success. The large size of our prefrontal cortex sets us apart from other mammals. This is what allows us to think. I don’t want to minimize the importance of thinking. Thinking is how we carry out, analyze, and report scientific research and experiments. It’s how we make bridges and buildings and dams that work and stay standing. But thinking is NOT how we innovate, design, or make scientific advances. Thinking is a left-brained activity working mostly with the information already on our brain’s hard drive, or what we perceive with our senses. It does not access the Universal Cloud Storage of Knowing (ooh, I like that).
When we know, as opposed to think, we access that universal cloud storage which includes not only the past (what’s already been thought by us) but the future (what hasn’t yet been thought by humans). When we do that, we’re able to grow from cognitive human beings into even more advanced, spiritual human beings. Our information and hence our possibilities become unlimited.
An example of thinking would be when we are looking for a job. Most of us when we want to find a job, look at what we believe to be our skills, and then decide what type of job, based on what we’ve known before (or perhaps a quick Google search), what kind of jobs we’re qualified for. And then, based on that thinking we start to look for known, existing jobs that are advertising. When we apply and aren’t hired or worse, we see no jobs advertised of the kind we think we’re qualified for, we decide that there are no jobs for us. Therefore, using rational deduction (which is just a fancy name for thinking), we conclude that we will not ever get a job that we’re qualified for or want.
An example of Knowing as opposed to Thinking in job hunting would be when my husband and I bought a home on the other side of the country without having jobs in the city of our new home (in a time before widespread remote working). It was a down economy all over the country at that time. I expressed a worry to my husband about moving to another city purely on spec. I cited a statistic in the newspaper stating that a high percentage of people spent up to six months looking for jobs in our sector. He asked, “Honey, is there a percentage of people who DO get jobs in our sector quickly?” I said, yeah, there’s a percentage, it’s like three percent. He said, “Then that’s our percentage. We’re the three percent.”
This wasn’t arrogance on my husband’s part. It wasn’t affirmation. And it wasn’t just privilege (although privilege may have played a role in the freedom to know, and bolstered the belief that statistics didn’t apply, more about that perhaps in the future). This was my husband expressing his own knowing. He’s a smart guy. He knows how statistics work. He simply knew that we weren’t on the business end of those statistics. Instead of thinking about whether we’d get a job and how we’d get one, he just knew we would. And, indeed, we moved and in a matter of weeks, I secured a high-paying job with great benefits.
Where are you limiting your choices by sticking to what you think instead of what you might know?