Have you ever heard the term, ‘knowing is half the battle’? What a load of crap!
How many people know that:
• Smoking is bad for you.
• Eating poorly can lead to health issues.
• A sedentary lifestyle will take years off of your life.
• Focussing on negative thoughts will reduce your happiness.
How many people:
• Stay in dead end jobs that they hate?
• Remain in unhealthy or abusive relationships?
• Choose to self medicate with elicit or even prescribed drugs?
Most people that do these things, on some level, are ‘in the know’, and that is certainly not ‘half the battle’. I love this quote Derek Sivers, shared on the Tim Ferriss podcast:
“If information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”
Knowing that you need to change is the first step in the process of actually changing. ‘Knowing’ is the compass that points you towards the battle, as opposed to being half of the battle. Once you have the direction you want to go, then the key thing that needs to happen is taking action towards that change.
Recently I’ve seen a lot of platitudes on Twitter and Facebook, as well as in searches for memes when looking for images to add to these Daily Ink posts. Words of wisdom and encouragement that I’m prone to sharing too. They sound nice. They feel good. They tell you that you are special, ‘You can do it!’, believe in yourself. These are wonderful words of inspiration, but there is nothing actionable about them.
They remind me of Matt Foley in his Saturday Night Live skit, ‘Go for it!‘, where he plays a motivational speaker who essentially says, change your life or you’ll end up just like me, “living in a van down by the river”! While most platitudes and words of wisdom and inspiration do not fall under the category of ‘change or you’ll end up being a loser like me’ they are similar in that they don’t really do more than provide encouragement.
A favourite quote of mine comes from John Grinder and Richard Bandler, the founders of NLP – Neuro Linguistic Programming, “What is the difference that makes the difference?” This goes beyond platitudes because it identifies what can be done differently in order to change behaviour. It’s the ‘it’ in ‘You can do it’. It’s actionable.
There are some pretty amazing motivational people out there that understand what it takes to change behaviour in people for the better, and there are also a lot of motivational speakers who understand inspiration but don’t meaningfully inspire perspiration – the work needed to actually change… and to me, this is the difference that makes a difference.
