The other day, I was sitting in our sunroom watching a video interview with Simon Sinek, who I absolutely love. If you aren’t familiar with Simon’s work, there are a ton of terrific videos on his YouTube channel—I suggest starting with Why is Your Origin Story or Be the Idiot—and I can’t recommend his book, Start With Why, highly enough. Why is a deceptively simple question that I think many of us have a hard time answering when it comes to talking about the things we make or want to make. Anyway, I was watching this video and in it Simon was telling a story about Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike. Basically, using running as a metaphor, Phil was illustrating the meaning behind their famous “JUST DO IT” slogan and how it has nothing to do with winning and everything to do with trying. As Simon said, “when Nike is at their best, they celebrate the ones who do, not the ones who win.” When the video finished, Adrianne, who was working at her computer across the room, looked up and asked whether I knew about the knowing-doing gap. I said no and she spent the next several minutes explaining it to me and she encouraged me to go do some reading about it online, which I did and, wow, what an eye-opener.
Most of the research I’ve seen so far is at the organizational or team level but, in a nutshell, the knowing-doing gap is the disconnect between knowledge and action. To put it another way, we know far more than we do. I know that this is absolutely true for me. As I mentioned in a previous Iteration, my professional history is very diverse, from technical theater to graphic design to welding to building practical special effects and my resume doesn’t even mention all of the knowledge and skills that I’ve pursued personally. And honestly, that’s one of the things that makes it difficult for me as an artist. I want the things that I make—and I mean everything I make—to broadly draw from my skills and experience and that often means that many of the projects or ideas that I come up with are far more complicated than I can accomplish on my own. And rather than compromise on the scope of whatever it is—which I often see as watering it down or making it less interesting or satisfying to me as the maker—I simply don’t act and the project goes nowhere, or the idea is relegated to notes and drawings in a sketchbook.
So what’s the answer? How do we close the gap between knowing and doing in order to make our doing not just more consistent, but also more challenging and more interesting, both for us and for an audience? One thing we absolutely need to address is failure and the fear that often comes with it. If you’re a Steven Pressfield fan, you know this as Resistance. If you’ve never heard of Steven Pressfield, when you’re done reading or listening to this Iteration, go buy yourself a copy of Steven’s book The War of Art. In simplest terms, Resistance is self-sabotage. It’s the little voice—or sometimes it’s a big voice—that keeps telling you that you aren’t good enough, that you don’t have what it takes (whatever it is), or that you are doomed to fail. If you’re anything like me, you’ve given in to Resistance many times before and will likely give in many more times to come.
In researching the knowing-doing gap, I took a bunch of notes and I thought I would share a few things that I think definitely help me and might even help you. The first one is around failure and when you read it (or hear it), it seems painfully obvious, but we still find ways to ignore it. Very simply, there is no doing without mistakes. You may think, “well, of course,” but I can almost guarantee you that at some point in your life, you didn’t take action on something because you didn’t want to mess it up. I know I have. Truth be told, I still do. One of my favorite writers, Elizabeth Gilbert, said, “Mistakes will be made. Failure will occur. You pick yourself up and carry on.” If that sounds a little too esoteric, there’s actually science behind why failure is a good thing. When things are going well and we’re getting positive reinforcement, our perception becomes biased to focus on more positive things and the breadth of our attention actually narrows. But when we fail and no longer get that jolt of positivity on the back of a problem solved or a job well done, our attention zooms out and our brains look for new possibilities to develop thoughts that might get us back to dopamine-fueled feelings of confidence and positivity. The bottom line is that there is no success except through failure. Or in the words of the great Truman Capote, “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”
Two of the other things I wrote down actually go together and they are to ask for help and to find an accountability partner. Realizing what we are and aren’t capable of can open us up to creating work that simply wouldn’t be possible alone. For example, several years ago, a photographer friend of mine decided to partner with a retoucher because he found that his own post-production skills were limiting what he was capable of accomplishing by himself. By collaborating with someone who specialized in the skills he lacked, he was able to focus his creative energy on what he does best. As a result, he was able to realize more complex and elaborate projects and win client work that likely would have been beyond his reach on his own.
An accountability partner is someone who will be honest with you regardless of whether or not you like what they have to say. They will keep you on track and help you celebrate the victories, but they will also call you out and kick your ass if they see that you need it. For me, one of those people is Sean Tucker. Over the past five or so years, Sean has become not only one of my best friends in the world, but also one of the people who I feel most accountable to. He can—and does—say whatever he thinks I need to hear and because I know that whatever he says comes from a place of love and respect, I am able to hear it—mostly. An accountability partner is invested in your success and that unwavering support, combined with a very real fear of letting them down, can motivate you to stay on track and achieve what you set out to do. At least that’s how it works for me.
The last thing I want to mention is something that tends to work incredibly well for me on a number of levels—and I really feel it when I’m not doing it—and that is to write things down. Keep a journal, make to do lists, or use Post-it notes. Do whatever you have to do to get your ideas and your goals out of your head an onto a sheet of paper. If analog isn’t your thing, there are dozens of apps to choose from—but set up reminders and notifications so that you actually look at what you’ve written and it doesn’t just get lost in the cloud. I first got into the habit of using Post-Its when I was an Art Director at Universal Studios. I would jot down notes, project ideas, meeting times, deadlines, and whatever else I really needed to keep track on Post-It notes that I would stick around the edges of my monitors. Since the screens were where the bulk of my attention was focused throughout the day, that seemed the most logical place to put them—and it worked. Years later, I am still infinitely more productive when I write things down. It also works for coming up with new ideas for creative projects. Getting things out of my head and into a notebook or just onto a scrap of paper means that I’ll see it and be more likely to act on it, rather than simply letting it get lost in what Adrianne calls my “busy brain.” Getting ideas out on paper also makes room for new ideas, so it’s a win-win.
Most of the research I’ve done suggests that the knowing-doing gap is increasing rapidly because the amount of information we are expected to retain is growing exponentially. But I think by identifying the gaps that are relevant to you, you can begin to develop tools and strategies to help minimize some of the obstacles between knowledge for its own sake and applying that knowledge as action in your own life.
Questions:
How and where does the knowing-doing gap manifest itself in your life, and what are you doing to close it?
When I was a sophomore in high school, my honors biology class took a weekend field trip to Joshua Tree National Park (although it was still a National Monument back then). In the campsite across from ours was a group of twenty or so amateur astronomers who invited a few of my curious friends and me over to look through their telescopes. We spent most of the night with them looking at galaxies, nebulae, clusters, and stars—and from that night on, I was a fan of astronomy. I convinced my parents to get me a telescope for my birthday and spent clear nights—if I wasn’t in my darkroom—in our back yard exploring the universe. Recently, I came across a terrific site that offers an interactive map of the known universe. More than 200,000 galaxies are represented, each containing billions of stars and planets.
Mind the Gap
As a PhD student, I think knowing-doing gap and finding the small ways to bridge it, is in essence a description of my work. I was doing the math the other day, and figured that I've read or skimmed (i.e. took notes) around 70 scientific papers in 2021, and I'd argue that's a low end for someone in my field. At the same time, I've authored 1. But doing that 1 paper taught me more about my field than reading an extra 100 would.
There is an argument for outsourcing _some_ of the work (like the photographer-retoucher relationship you mention above), but at the end of the day that's very problem dependent. The day I start relegating parts of my work to others, is the day when I understand these parts worse. Yes, I can achieve more by being higher-up on the ladder (postdocs and professors "author" many papers a year), but I'd argue the deep knowledge you can only develop by doing is getting lost.
What's important I suppose is finding what you're comfortable with losing?
Your iterations are always thought provoking, thank you. Now for the doing, when I stop the procrastination that is.