Being selective about what you read, think and expose your mind towards can make or break the value you bring to the table of the world.
As a child, my father would take me for bi-weekly excursions to the library where I would check out an armful of books each time, causing the librarian to squint incredulously and ask my father if I was actually going to read it all. My father would grin and proudly reply that yes, I was going to be reading seven pounds worth of books. He’s seen it for himself.
And yet, over the course of my lifetime, having gone across multiple genres of fiction and non-fiction alike; I often wonder what exactly have I been gaining from my obsession to consume anything and everything that piqued my interest.
I started off the way kids normally do, with books like “Where The Wild Things Are”, “Jacob Two-Two And The Hooded Fang” and it didn’t take very long before my wandering eye took notice of the titles within the 000s section of the library shelves.
Esoteric awesomeness. In there, I found the tales of Bigfoot, Mothman, alien abductions and exorcisms gone wrong to be far more compelling to me than fiction ever could be. Because it’s one thing to hear a scary story about a man with a hook scratching along the side of a parked car where two lovers have had their coitus interrupted; its another thing altogether to see blurry photos of hubcaps and saucers dangling on invisible strings supporting a more deeper and fantastic mythology presented as ostensible fact.
In my passions, I’ve consumed much of the odd and unusual. Stories of Elvis being alive, haunted houses, yogis who were able to levitate and be buried alive for days at a time. Eventually my eye again wandered, and landed upon the fantasy genre where I’ve consumed much of the entirety of Piers Anthony’s “Xanth” along with his Incarnations of Immortality series before moving onto Stephen King, Philip K Dick and then delving into religion, mythology, spirituality and various other odds and ends.
And yet, there was little that I could use from all that I have read to present and offer something of value that would be appreciated and leveraged into a career for myself. At the moment, anyways. I mean, what good is it really, when you know that one of the aliens recovered from the Roswell crash was alive and had a taste for strawberry ice cream? Does it really matter if I know that cocaine was found on Egyptian mummies when the coca leaf — indigenous to South America — meant that there was trade between continents in a time when transoceanic travel was considered impossible to extremely unlikely? Does it help me at all to know that Nazis were given amphetamines to turn them into “super” soldiers or that a Brazilian fellow was able to diagnose ailments by shoving a rusty knife into people’s eyes? Could I parlay any of this information into the real world? Where? How?
It took me many years to realize that although I followed my passions; I did not know how to leverage them. I knew I was a decent writer, but it didn’t appeal to me to learn the complexities of grammar, punctuation and the right and wrong ways of constructing a sentence. I was reminded of a quote by Piers Anthony in this regard when he once said that in order to walk, you do not need to learn about or understand all the muscles and tendons in your legs before being able to walk. You simply walk.
Just as with walking, driving, riding a bicycle, swimming and peeing in a urinal; there are actions that do not require a through analysis or understanding in order to complete them.
So in examining myself, I came about to the conclusion that knowledge is not actually power. It’s the application of knowledge that incubates and gives birth to meaningful influence.
A passage that illustrates this point very well, comes from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author and creator of Sherlock Holmes who in the story, “A Study In Scarlett” describes how the famous detective managed to retain a vast and varied amount of information that buttressed his legendary powers of observation and deduction.
You see,” Sherlock explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“But the Solar System!” Watson protested.
“What of the deuce is it to me?” Holmes interrupted impatiently: “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
And so it is, what a person chooses to entertain in their minds is what will form the basis of personal power. Like junk food, what you put inside your brain, will dictate the quality of your thoughts, observations and insights gleaned from the external world.
However, this does not mean that a rabid obsession with Harlequin romance novels is going to make you unintelligent or less able to form a skill set that can be practically applied; it simply means that your specialization, your unique “niche” is going to become more elusive and challenging than average, to discover.
A car enthusiast has many outlets available to express his passions toward; whereas someone who is keenly interested in cat videos on YouTube, has a much lower chance of finding or developing a niche enough for them to make a reasonable and respectable living with.
Knowledge is not always power, which is why I find myself more aware of what media I consume, and pay close attention to how I may use what I’ve learned. Otherwise, one may run the risk of becoming a hoarder. Stuffing the rooms in their homes with frivolous and unnecessary items that they are unable to make practical use of.
Just a thought.
