You Only ‘Know’ When You ‘Did’

Ever caught yourself thinking (or worse, saying) “I know that” when someone is speaking or sharing insights with you?

Check yourself: you only know if you can answer “Yes” to all of these things:

• You’ve spent some time really thinking the topic through (if you haven’t, how can you really know that you know?)
• You know enough about it to know the extent and limits of your knowledge on the topic (if you don’t have any, you don’t know it well enough)
• You’ve done the things being described in the topic, or experienced them first-hand (so it’s not just hearsay passing as real knowledge)
• You could do the thing being described again, with present-day considerations in mind (so that your knowledge isn’t out-of-date)

Our Creative team often hears things like, “We know our target market really well”, and “We’re really clear on our marketing messaging.”

Yet when pressed to share the things they know, the answers are decidedly less confident. They didn’t do the work to really, truly know.

We only ‘discover’ when we ‘do.’

So we only ‘know’ when we ‘did’.

Doing the work separates the deluded from the enlightened.

Over to you: in the areas that matter in your pursuit of important work, what things do you know for sure? Are you sure about that?