Accumulating Knowledge and Taking Action

There are people who remember names and details quite well, such as historical events, historical people, artist names, names of artwork, actor names, etc., whereas I am not good at it. I really envy people with that ability. Because of that, I forced myself into an area where it didn't require remembering names, but to understand theories and where I could solve problems; that was engineering.

Only accumulating knowledge doesn't create anything; creation requires action. Only taking action without knowledge results in failures over a long period of time, to become successful if at all. Taking action with the knowledge that you have, after enough trial and error, you will gain wisdom based on experience, and become successful. So "Knowledge" plus "Action" will lead you to experience based "Wisdom."

I started to play bass guitar without having proper music education. Since I was good with my hands, I was able to play quite well but only to a certain level. I wanted to get better, but I bumped into difficulties; I could not perform as well as I wanted. So, I started to learn musical theory to be able to improve. My experience with music was as if I was taking action without knowledge, resulting in the failure to grow.

On the other hand, I really appreciate my business education in the USA. MBA education did not really help my startup, establishing a new business requires a different set of skills, but as the company started to roll, my business knowledge from academia had surely helped me a lot. Of course, it required of a lot of trial and error, but taking action based on knowledge allowed the business to continue to be quite sound.

Only accumulating knowledge creates nothing without action; there is no time to know everything. Only taking action leads to failures; there is no time to keep on failing. Of course, failures are not always bad, but you must do the right things if you want to be successful in what you do. At least you can learn from your failures and create some experienced-based knowledge, or what we call "learning the hard way," but it surely is a time-consuming process.

Between accumulating knowledge first and taking action first, the latter allows you to get results. However, the results can be much favorable and come faster with proper knowledge. As a conclusion, I recommend you to take action first, and self-educate simultaneously, so that you have a chance to succeed sooner than later.