563. Knowing Is Not the Same as Learning

If you’ve ever said to yourself, I know this stuff, so why am I not doing it? Or maybe you are doing it and it’s not working. This is the episode for you. There is a difference between knowing and learning, not just a little difference, not just a semantic difference, a huge difference. And today we’re going to dive into what the difference is, why it matters, and how to make sure that you are not just knowing, you are learning the things that you want to make your life better and easier. Welcome to Better Than Happy, Episode 563: Knowing Is Not the Same as Learning. Let’s go.

Hey there and welcome to Better Than Happy. My name is Jody Moore and my mission is to empower you to live the life you want today and create more of what you want for tomorrow. Buckle up because this is real talk, tough love, and insight into human behavior so that we can all be on to ourselves.

As a side note, I also support other coaches with a similar mission so sometimes we may talk coaching strategies or marketing and business on this podcast. I’m glad you’re here, and if you like what you hear today, please, please follow or subscribe to the show. Just go ahead and click the button and help me out by sharing it with others. Thanks a lot and let’s dive in.

Hey there everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I have a very fun topic to talk with you about today. It’s one that has a lot of personal relevance in my own life right now. I’m going to tell you a little bit about that, and we’re going to dive into why understanding this subject can be a game changer as you navigate challenges and go after the things that you want to achieve in your life.

So this is the kind of premise of today’s episode, and I want to start with this because it’s important that we are on the same page about this premise. And I want to tell you why I think it’s true. And it is this: As knowing gets easier, learning gets harder. Let me say it another way. As our ability to know things is easier, simpler, faster, our ability to learn things is even more challenging. What do you mean by that, Jody Moore? I’m going to tell you.

First of all, we have to step back and take a look at why this is such a relevant topic in our world right now. So, this is actually not a new thing. As soon as the internet came on the scene and became available to the masses of us, which for many of you has been since you were born. For some of us it was a little bit later in our life, but for many years now, we’ve been living with pretty easy access to the internet. And as the internet became more and more efficient and again, more accessible, knowing became easier and easier, right?

Our ability to get information today, just thanks to the internet, is so easy. You can simply type in a question in a search engine and it will even modify your question to make it an even better question and it will scour the web and find you all kinds of information, right? You can get everything from written material to videos to people’s opinions to well-cited research. And so the ability to know, to find answers, to gather information has never been easier. Now we’re seeing AI come on the scene, which is making it even easier to know because I don’t even have to do the work of sifting through the search that I get and find the best information. I don’t have to click into the articles and read them, go in and watch the videos. AI is even making it faster and easier. It will curate the information, absorb the information, analyze the information, and then condense it down and spit it out and give it to me in very consumable, bite-sized amounts very quickly.

So, the ability to know has never been easier and will continue to get even faster and easier, looks like, which is making the ability to learn even harder. What is the difference between knowing and learning? We must begin there, and then I’ll tell you why I think this is true. To know is to accumulate truth, to accumulate answers, to accumulate insight or wisdom. The reason I use all of those words—truth, answers, insight, wisdom—is because any of them can be defined in a lot of different ways. And what is true is usually up for debate. What’s true to one person might not be true to another, and so I don’t mean truth in the form of like this is existential truth or even this is just purely fact. I mean wisdom, knowledge, ideas, principles, strategies, all of that kind of information that we might want to take in as we find the answers, we now know. If we read a book, we know something more about that topic than we used to know, right?

Learning on the other hand is not just about having the answers. It’s not just about having a strategy or having access to all of the information. Learning shows up in your actions and in your results. If you have learned something, you are able to do it and you are able to create whatever result you want to. Learning is applied knowledge when you choose to apply it.

So let’s think about this. My sister Lindsay is an amazing baker. She’s also an amazing crafter who makes beautiful felt flowers. You should go check her out. At any rate, she’s amazing at a lot of things, but I love Lindsay’s bread. She makes delicious bread. She makes cinnamon bread. Lindsay should send me some of that cinnamon bread. I haven’t had it in a while. But she also makes these wonderful rolls.

So last year, she came for Thanksgiving dinner and I said, Lindsay, we’re going to make rolls because I want to learn how to make rolls, the way you make rolls, right? Now, Lindsay had sent me her roll recipe in advance already. I already knew how to make the rolls. I had the knowledge, I had the recipe with even directions on there. But I had tried making Lindsay’s rolls and they didn’t turn out like Lindsay’s rolls. They did not taste right. They weren’t quite cooked right, they weren’t the right consistency. I had all kinds of problems, right? So it wasn’t until Lindsay came to my house and we made rolls together that I learned a little bit more, but even after that, I made them on my own a couple of times until I got to the point where now I can recreate Lindsay’s rolls almost as good as Lindsay, not quite as good as Lindsay, but almost.

Now I have learned how to make Lindsay’s rolls. I knew how, but then I had to do it over and over again, make little adjustments, little tweaks. Now, why didn’t Lindsay just tell me about these adjustments and tweaks? Because Lindsay isn’t even aware of some of the things that she does, some of the things she pays attention to, whether to add more flour or less flour might change depending on the humidity of the day or the elevation at which you’re baking or how your oven operates, right? So she knows these things intuitively because she has learned how to make amazing rolls. So it’s not like she was trying to withhold it from me. These are just the little subtle nuances that come with learning something. And when you’ve learned it, then it does become so intuitive that it seems easy, it seems simple because we’re not even consciously aware of those changes that we make, right?

This is the same with playing the piano. I like to play the piano. But guess what? I know how to play the piano. I know how to read music. I can point to the music and tell you which notes are on the scale. I can look at the piano and tell you where middle C is and what all the notes are called. I know what it means when there are sharps and flats, and I know what all the music notes mean. I know how the timing works. I know how to play the piano, but I’m still learning how to play the piano. I have the knowledge up here in my mind, but the learning where it becomes more intrinsic and more natural and more automatic, and I can do it without thinking about it and I make fewer mistakes and it becomes part of who I am, I become a piano player, is something that for me anyway takes a very long time, lots of practice, lots of execution, and then my brain adjusts and my body even, my fingers adjust accordingly. There’s a difference between knowing and learning, right?

My daughter who’s ten years old likes me to curl her hair in the mornings before school. She’s got this gorgeous long, thick hair. And so often we’ll curl her hair before school, but every now and then I travel for work or something. And so I said to my husband, hey, come over here and let me teach you how to curl Taylor’s hair in case I’m out of town and she wants some help with her hair. So he came over and I showed him, I curled a couple pieces and then I handed him the curling iron. And my husband, who’s super skilled, he’s very handy around the house. He fixes things in amazing ways and he’s very coordinated, very talented, athletic guy. I watched him try to curl Taylor’s hair and I was like, what is he doing? Because knowing how to curl hair and learning to curl hair are two very different things. Knowing can happen very quickly. I just show him within a matter of a couple minutes. But as he tries to execute it, it’s a whole ‘nother story. There are little subtle nuances in the way I turn my wrist as I’m curling hair that I don’t even think about because I’ve been curling hair for so many years.

How about raising kids, right? You start having babies and you can know what to do, how to take care of a baby. You can take a class on it, you can read books on it. The doctors and nurses can give you advice or your friends who are parents can give you advice and you might know how to raise that baby. But it’s not until you spend a lot of time trying to raise your own babies and make lots of mistakes, by the way, with all of these things that we’re doing, and then adjust it and then try again that we actually have learned how to take care of a baby or raise a child. And maybe that’s a difficult enough task that we never actually fully learn it. Maybe some of these things, we have a whole lifetime of opportunity to keep learning even though a lot of it we already know.

Coaching is this way. This is why my coach training that I teach when I’m certifying coaches is eight months long because I can tell you how to coach. I can explain it to you, I can even teach it to you, and you will know how to coach. In fact, many of you who are in my programs who have listened to me coach over and over again, you know how to coach. Many people who come to my coach training have listened to me coach before, and they come thinking they know how to coach, and then they try coaching, and they realize, wait a second, I might know how to coach, but I have not learned how to coach. And that’s why I have them do lots of coaching, and I give them clients to coach and we spend lots of time giving them feedback and really letting them learn to coach. It’s a whole different ball game, right? Learning to coach.

Same with marketing and sales. By the way, we’ve been getting lots of questions about coach training, so I’ll just throw a sign out. We’re going to be opening up a priority list for coach training if you want to apply for coach training. It won’t be for a few more months still. We’ll be opening up a priority list. We’ll be taking, interviewing, I should say, people in the fall who are interested to start coach training in 2027.

But at any rate, marketing and sales is another thing that I spend a lot of time teaching people, right? I’m constantly trying to teach my clients marketing and sales. And I can teach them over and over again and I will, and they will know marketing and they will understand sales, but they haven’t learned it until they try to execute it over and over and over again and make mistakes and make it their own in many ways, right? And that is why I create experiences for those of you interested in learning to sell, not just knowing how to sell, but learning to sell. I am going to be teaching Sales School in June here in San Diego.

So if you want to come to that, go to JodyMoore.com/sales. But that’s going to be a three-day immersive experience. Why three days? Why do we need three days together in a very intimate group? I’m capping it. In fact, most of the seats are already sold. We only have a few left. But I want it to be small and I want it to be intense because I want you to learn to sell. And that’s going to require you doing it and we’re going to do it over and over again in that three-day intensive at JodyMoore.com/sales if you want to check that out.

My point here is the reason learning gets harder as knowing gets easier is because if the knowledge is just handed to us, we have not put in enough time and effort to truly absorb and understand the information. Okay, so let’s imagine that we live without the internet and maybe even access to books and information like that is much, much harder, as it did used to be at one point, right? And if you live in San Diego like I do and you go to the beach, maybe you would notice that the ocean seems to come up and down on the beach. It’s what we call the tide.

And so maybe I decide I want to understand why that is and what’s going on and are there patterns to it and what do we think causes it? If I didn’t have access to the answer on the internet or in a book or somebody that I could ask that already understood, I would have to spend a lot of time. I might observe the beach every day at different times of the day and I might take notes. I might write down, oh, at this time of the day it was here and at this time of the day it was here. And then I might start noticing what other factors might influence it. Does it have something to do with the weather? Does it have something to do with the time of year? Does it have something to do with the time of day and the sun or the clouds or the moon or the stars or the seasons? And I could eventually figure out a lot about the tides by studying it and observing it and making notes.

So I want you to ask yourself, if that’s how I learned about the tides, would I know it better than if I just went to the internet and did a quick Google search and got somebody’s answer about what causes the tide to rise and fall? Obviously putting in the time and the effort means I would know it on a different level. I would have learned it as I accumulated the knowledge, right? As I went and found the answers to my questions, I also would have internalized a lot of it.

Again, if I didn’t know how to curl hair, then if no one was there to teach me how, I might attempt to try it and have lots of errors and as I figured out the way, I also am attempting it. And so I’m learning it as I acquire the knowledge. This is the reason why I think knowledge becoming easier means learning gets harder. And I wanted to bring this up today because again, with the onset of AI that is already in my opinion become an even more dramatic problem. I know this because people’s ability to think critically, the questions that people are asking, some of the things that are coming up blow my mind that people are even asking it. It appears to me that we are becoming less knowledgeable in certain areas, and that is because we are becoming less intrinsically knowledgeable. We might know more, but we have learned less.

Okay, so let’s talk for just a minute about why this might make our lives harder and more painful. I know some of it is obvious, but I want to flush it out and then I’m going to tell you why there’s very good news. Okay? This doesn’t mean we’re all in for it. We’re not sunk. I’m not even trying to bad talk the internet or AI. I am fans of both of those tools. But I want you to become aware of this so that those tools don’t actually minimize your life in certain ways that they will without awareness, in my opinion. Okay? So I want you to think about your life as a classroom. That is how I like to think about life. I first heard Kim Giles describe it this way many, many years ago. Thank you, Kim Giles. But I still think about it this way. I do not think about life as a test. I think about life as a classroom. Okay?

There are classes that life enrolls us in that we did not choose. Things that are challenging that we need to deal with. Maybe they just happen and we don’t know why. Maybe they happen as a result of somebody else’s agency, but we all go through challenges or trials or hard things that we didn’t choose. Maybe in hindsight, there’s something we could have done to avoid them, but many times that’s not even the case. And these I think of as classes that I got enrolled in. I got signed up for these classes. And the reason I like to think of them as classes is because they’re difficult, but they also provide me the opportunity for learning and growth and evolution. Then there are classes that I sign up for, classes that we sign ourselves up for, in the form of things we decide to pursue. Goals, for example, opportunities we decide to go after, improvements we decide to make to our life or things we want to contribute to the world.

So those are the two kinds of classes that I get to help people with all the time. I help people navigate challenges, I help people achieve their goals. And in either case, the more we learn information and don’t just settle for the knowing of information, the easier it becomes to ace those classes. And by acing them, I mean getting what you want out of it, becoming a better version of you because of it, and navigating it with as much grace and ease as possible. It doesn’t mean you did it the right way. It doesn’t mean that you have to earn somebody’s approval. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying you use these challenges and opportunities to become a next level version of you. That’s what acing a class is in my opinion.

Okay, so with that, let’s look at how this lack of learning and excess of knowledge is making these classes even harder. First of all, it is putting so many of my clients into what I call the shame or blame trap. The shame or blame trap is a place we get stuck in which causes us to try to determine what’s gone wrong. What’s gone wrong? Is it your fault or is it somebody or something outside of me’s fault that this isn’t working? Are they wrong? Is this strategy broken or is this person wrong? Or is it me? Am I broken? Is there something wrong with me? Am I less than in some way? And that’s why we’re having this problem. Whose fault is it that we’re in this class and that we’re not getting through it in the way I think we should, as quickly as I think we should? That is the shame or blame trap. It says something has gone wrong and I got to figure out whose fault is it. This is not useful. This will keep you stuck and spinning and not progressing.

So let’s say somebody gives me a strategy for my business and I decide to go try out this strategy and I don’t get the result I want. If I don’t get the result I want and I don’t understand this is a lack of learning, not a lack of knowledge, I might stay stuck in this shame or blame trap. I might either go, that strategy doesn’t work. And then I discount the strategy and I start thinking a bunch of negative thoughts about the strategy. Now, I’m not saying you have to use every strategy you’re given. I’m saying if it is a useful strategy and you want to make it work for you, then pointing to it saying it’s a bad strategy isn’t going to serve you.

And likewise going, it must be me. I just must not be good at this. I must be broken or inferior. I’m not a kind of person who can achieve this, is also not going to serve you, right? We don’t want to get stuck in a shame or blame trap. We need to be comfortable being not good at things. It’s okay to be not good at things. It’s okay to know things but having not learned them yet doesn’t make you weak or less than or mean that you’re not going to be able to get there at some point.

So the way out of a shame blame trap is to recognize that nothing has gone wrong. There’s nothing wrong with this strategy, even if you decide you’re not going to continue to execute that strategy. It might not be something you want to do in your business or in your life or in your home or what have you. But there’s nothing wrong with that strategy. It’s not a bad strategy. And there’s also nothing wrong with me, even if I just haven’t become yet the person who can do it, right? A shame blame trap will keep you stuck. Letting go of it, knowing nothing is wrong here will allow you to move forward. It’ll allow you to either abandon the strategy and choose a new one if you want or continue to learn and become the person you want to become. Okay?

I’m going to go back to Lindsay’s rolls. If I would have, the first time I made Lindsay’s rolls gone, this is not a good recipe. I thought this recipe was good, but I just made them and they’re not good. Or if I would have said, man, what’s the matter with me? Why can I not make rolls? Then I wouldn’t be able to make them today. And I know it’s such a silly example. It’s a lot easier when you’re making rolls than when you’re building your business or you’re trying to lose weight or you’re trying to raise your children or you’re trying to – whatever you’re trying to do. I understand it’s harder, but it’s literally the same thing happening.

So let’s talk about the second problem that this easy knowing and hard learning can create in our lives, which is an inability to think critically and solve problems. How do we get good at thinking critically and solving problems? Well, we do it. We think critically and we solve problems. So if I decide I want to understand something, I want to know something, and someone doesn’t just hand me the answer on a platter, then I use my ability to think critically and solve problems to even gather the information in the first place, which makes me even better at thinking critically and solving problems. So everything being handed to us in very simple format without us even having to navigate the information or take the time to read through it or internalize it means I’m getting worse at doing those things.

The third thing I’m going to talk about and then I’m going to go through and give us some strategies that can help to circumvent all of this is our inability to be patient and allow for unknowns. It’s our inability to be patient, to let things take time, and to tolerate the unknown. We are so impatient, right? We want things right now because most things we can get right now. I can order something on Amazon and have it delivered to my house in hours, not just days, hours. I can look up information and have it right at my fingertips. I can ask the internet a question that years ago, even a decade ago would have been really hard to know and get the answer right at my fingertips. Not only right there on the internet, but somebody probably made a video demonstrating for me how to do it.

We get in the car to drive somewhere and if we put it in the map, it not only tells us how to get there, it tells us how long it’s going to be before we arrive. And if something happens like an accident or traffic or something, then the map adjusts so that we know minute to minute, second to second even, how long it’s going to be before we arrive. That is why we are growing less and less tolerant of uncertainty, and we are growing less and less patient as the world doesn’t require so much patience of us. So again, I’m not trying to say I’m against GPSs or the internet or any of these modern conveniences. I’m saying I want you to be aware that your ability to think critically, solve problems, be patient, and tolerate unknown might be becoming diminished and you’re going to want to be aware of that and work on it. In just a minute, we’ll talk a little bit more about how.

The last thing that I want to highlight that is a problem when it comes to our easy knowing and hard learning is that our ability to be creative is declining. Now, I love thinking about creativity. I love thinking about imagination and it’s kind of along the same lines of critical thinking and problem solving, right? But I think about creativity as being more playful, more imaginative, more like a dream state. And creativity is one of only a few resources we have that the more we use that resource, the more it grows. Think about it. Our other resources, many of them, the more we use them, the more they’re depleted.

For example, time is a resource, right? The more time I use, though, the less time I have. My energy is a resource. But the more energy I use, the less energy I have until I go to sleep or eat something or whatever and recharge and refuel my energy. The more focus I use. I have the ability to focus. That’s one of my resources. But the more focus I use, the less focus I have, again, until I sleep and recharge in some way. So most of our resources, like money, same with money, right? That’s an interesting one that can go a lot of ways, but most of the resources we have become depleted and have to be restored. But creativity, the more I use it, the more it grows. The more creative I am, the more creative I become. So our creativity is declining because we’re using it less.

Instead of doing my own thinking outside the box, coming up with ideas, I can go right to an AI tool or the internet or another person and get the ideas from them, which weakens my ability to become creative. In fact, I like to think of it this way sometimes. I’m like, I could go to AI and ask it to come up with some good ideas for me. And I still do. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying not to use these tools. We’ll talk about that in a minute. But in that case, if I go to AI and ask it to come up with ideas, I am training AI to get better at coming up with ideas for this thing. Or I can go to my own brain and see what it could come up with and try to come up with some ideas on my own. In which case, I train my own brain to get better at coming up with ideas. Which one would serve you better in your life, do you think? Just saying.

Okay, so what do we do about this? I want you to keep all the amazing tools in your life that you want to utilize. The first and most important thing that we can do to prevent any of this causing problems for us is to just become aware. That is the main reason I made this episode. You just listening to this episode and starting to notice the application of it now. I hope you maybe listen to it again and start noticing the application of it in your life. Maybe you’ll even notice it in the lives of others. That’s the easiest place to notice is in other people’s lives. Be careful you don’t turn it into judgment. I’m not saying to judge people for how they’re using the internet or AI or what have you. I’m just saying notice it.

Notice the reality of it because as you notice it, it will immediately shift things for you. You won’t fall for it when your brain says things like, well, this is just taking too long, or maybe I’m just not cut out for this. You’ll go, oh, that sounds like a shame blame trap and that sounds like a lack of patience. But good news. The fact that this feels like it’s taking too long means I have an opportunity now to increase my ability to be patient. So all right, doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it. It doesn’t feel good to have to be patient, but I’m going to use this to get better at being patient. I’m going to use this opportunity to get better at thinking critically because I don’t have an easy solution here or maybe in this case, I don’t want to go find the easy solution. I want to challenge myself to think critically for a minute, to make some decisions, to do some problem solving, to get creative.

And so just knowing that when you choose to and when you want to, you can still utilize these tools and skills that you have and it will sharpen them. Just be aware of it. Don’t fall for what your brain is giving you because your brain, remember, is a little bit misinformed. It hasn’t yet learned how to become the person who can do the things you’re trying to do.

The second thing I want you to do is challenge yourself and create opportunities to become, to learn. Okay? So gather the knowledge, make it easy if you want. And you don’t have to do this in every area you want to be knowledgeable about. It’s okay to just go look up the tides and get the knowledge and just be interested in it. It doesn’t mean you have to do something with everything that you know, but in the areas where you want to learn, where you want to become a person who can do that, challenge yourself to go do that. And that’s really just as simple as setting goals for yourself. Give yourself goals that will challenge you to become a next level version of you. And the harder they are, the better because then the more they will require problem solving and critical thinking and being patient and being creative and tolerating unknown. And I want you to create opportunities for yourself to become those things.

All right, that’s it. I’m not worried about our future. I’m not worried about the world. I believe that everything is going to work out as it should. But I think part of my job as someone who does what I do is to make us a little bit more aware. And these are the patterns I’m seeing in my clients. I’m seeing these patterns in myself. And I want to invite you to be patient with yourself. I’m going to give one final example. I mentioned that at the beginning, this is super relevant for me right now. And it’s because I have decided after, I don’t know, 11 years now I’ve had a podcast that I might as well film it on video and put it on YouTube. It’s just one more way for people to be able to access the information.

And so you would think that would be simple enough, right? And for some of you it would be very simple. But for me it has not been simple at all. And it’s not because I don’t have the knowledge. It’s not because many other people in the world don’t have the knowledge. So many people do and so many people are out there teaching how to do a YouTube channel. But I kid you not, it’s probably been four months of me, first of all, dragging my feet, not getting to the things I need to get to like ordering the equipment, setting it up, figuring it out. But then I’ve had problem after problem where the tech overheats and shuts down or I thought it was recording and it didn’t or just so many things that have gone wrong, right? And I’m talking months of this.

Even today, filming this video, partway through, I look over at my computer and realize the camera has overheated again and shut off. I’m still learning how to be someone that does their podcast in audio and on YouTube. I’m still learning it and it’s frustrating, right? Some days I want to throw my hands up, but you know what? I know so many things that I didn’t know before and I’m still working on internalizing that knowing. I’m working on becoming someone who can do this with more ease and grace. And I’m so grateful to myself for being willing to learn it.

One day, I’m sure I’ll look back and go, it’s actually easy, it’s not that hard at all. But right now it doesn’t feel that way. And I’m in for it because I want to strengthen my ability to think critically and solve problems and to be patient and to tolerate unknown and to get creative. And this is certainly allowing me to do all of those things. So thank you for joining me today. I hope this is relevant in your life in some way. Remember, we are not just here to learn, we are here to become. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next week on another episode. Bye-bye.

Hey everybody, thanks for listening today. Please do me a favor and make sure you’re following or subscribed to the show if you got a lot out of this and share it with a friend. Make sure you never miss an episode and help me spread the message of mental and emotional health and creating your best life. I’ll see you next time.