Knowledge Is Not Power Without Action

Knowledge is not power without taking action.

I was asked for book recommendations today and it got me thinking about the books that have inspired me to actually change my habits, do something different and take action in my life.

I have a whole bookshelf of personal development, financial mastery, spiritual books that I have read or part read and when I look at them now, I wonder;

“Which of them have caused me to change my daily habits or taken action that has made a serious difference in my life?”

So I began to think about this on my walk in the countryside today. If we just intake knowledge from reading, watching videos, listening to inspirational audio, yes, it is filling up our brain and mind with knowledge but so much knowledge without using it can cause inertia and procrastination.

And in business, procrastination that leads to inertia, means no money! No action to improve our circumstance. No reward for improvement.

In our personal life procrastination can mean not enjoying spiritual fulfillment, not losing weight, not being the healthy person that our knowledge knows we should be.

So gathering knowledge without  action, in my view, just leads to confused thought, muddled thinking and later in life, “what could have been” regrets.

How many times have you looked back when you had a great idea but didn’t do anything about it? How many times do you want to keep doing that?

So What Books, Videos, Seminars, Audio Programmes Caused Me To Move Forward In My Life?

1. The Bible

I cannot deny it. I love the teachings in the Gospels of the New Testament. It is where my feelings of love and kindness for my fellow man come from.  I was introduced to teachings within the bible from being a little boy at Sunday School and am grateful for my parents for taking me there – although at the time, I was a bit of a rebel.

I have been away from the Bible for long periods in my life. I am certainly not perfect. But He uplifts me and is a constant in my mind and whilst I have forgotten daily prayer for years on end sometimes, when I go back to Him , I feel the comforter he left us.

I believe Jesus to be my greatest mentor.

What is YOUR spiritiual connection? I know so many who have different spiritual mentors and my wife and her family are devout Buddhists and I have many friends of other faiths but still have this same spiritual connection from the faith that they follow.

2. Catch 22

I know Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 is fiction but as an 18 year old mentored by the biggest rebel I met as a young airmen in RAF Changi, Singapore. This book and other fiction books like the Ginger Man made me appreciate being an individual and caused me to always look beyond conforming and being institutionalised.

That book inspired me to seek alternative thinking to everything. It gave me insight into written humour, tragedy through blind duty. It enabled me to enjoy fiction to escape from reality for a few minutes every day, but it also caused me to enjoy the moment and being naughty sometimes because life isn’t meant to be serious all of the time.

3. The White Lotus

The White Lotus by John Hersey had a deep effect on my thinking about race and my fellow human family. I was an uncultured, wide eyed young man of 18 when my friend shared this book with me. It caused me to think so differently about how my black colleagues, the local people in Singapore, our room boy… everything.

It offers a different take on history that puts us in the place of those who suffered in the past from slavery and oppression and it opened my eyes to how blessed and privileged I was and to this day, I cannot stand predjudice of any sort. A fiction book that taught a message to a young man of how we are purely affected by the luck of the draw in to where we were born and to what communities we were born into.

“Not too far from now, in a world very like our own, the oppressors have changed places with the oppressed.

After their defeat in the Yellow War, the white people of America are thrust into a brutally altered reality. They are hunted like wild beasts and drive like cattle, transported in reeking ships and sold to their conquerors as field hands and house slaves. Robbed of their old names and their old language, treated with a mixture of cruelty and condescension by their Chinese masters, whites take on new identities and new strategies of survival. Some, like Nose, plunge into dissipation. Others, like Top Man, become imitation Yellows. And some, like White Lotus, rebel.”

4. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Steven Covey opened my eyes to how I could change my habits to the habits of successful, effective people. For a while I totally bought into this book. I bought a planner and everything! Gradually I fell away but some of the habits have subconsciously directed me into being more effective to this day. I believe if we all began to apply Covey’s 7 Habits our lives would see a new, organised way of life.

What are the 7 Habits Covey teaches?

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Pete