One Apple A Day #76
While only 12% of the people in the world could read and write in 1820, today the share has reversed: only 17% of the world population remains illiterate.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/literacy/
I grew up thinking that “knowledge is power”.
But is this still true?
Until 1980 almost half of the world population was illiterate. Internet was still a few years away.
So, at that point it was true. Being able to access a good education was crucial to obtain the knowledge needed to succeed in life.
Knowledge was power.
In the last 30 years, nations and organisations did an excellent job in increasing the access to education. Today only 17% of the world population remains illiterate. And it’s less than 2% in most European countries and USA.
We also experienced the explosion of the internet. The facts about the growth of data are staggering. More data has been created in the past two years than in the entire previous history of the human race.
With all this knowledge available with a simple search, can we still say that knowledge is power?
My answer is no. Knowledge is not power. It’s a potential of power. It is like the fuel we put in our car. It’s necessary to make our car move, but it’s useless without at least two other elements:
A spark to fire the fuel. Fuel stores energy but without a spark to make it burns, we wouldn’t be able to release that energy.
An engine to convert the energy created by the burning fuel in action.
Our rush to accumulate knowledge, with the idea that it would give us power, made us forget the importance of intuition. At some point, we started thinking that logic and knowledge was enough to solve any problems. But right now we have a staggering amount of knowledge, yet we struggle to address some problems. We must rediscover the power of imagination and intuition, our human capability to see beyond the boundaries of our knowledge. Only in this way we can find the spark needed to unleash the power of our knowledge.
On the other side knowledge without action is wasted. We all know how to lose weight. There are plenty of videos and articles providing solutions. But knowing how to do it, isn’t enough.
To know what to do is not the same of to do what you know.
Knowledge is not enough. Not anymore. If you don’t make an effort to apply that knowledge, you won’t get any result.
Don’t get me wrong; knowledge is necessary. A car won’t move without fuel. But we also need to listen to our intuition and have a “do” mindset.