Information gathering can become a form of procrastination.
Do not spend so much time gaining knowledge that you fail to act.
Progress and growth are built on action.
Information, knowledge, and data are merely the foundation from which you can make intelligent decisions and take informed action.
Although it must be noted that sometimes the best information leads us to correctly choose inaction or a change of action, action is and should be the goal of information gathering because life is meant to be lived, not just studied.
Studying or researching so much that you never do anything is essentially a decision not to live.
Do the intellectual work.
Study and gather information as needed, but use the knowledge, wisdom, and understanding you gain to live a better life, not to hide from life.
It is easy to excuse ourselves from taking risk by insisting that we need to do more research.
Research is important.
Good information and reliable intelligence are both essential for success.
After all, we cannot expect to achieve our goals if we have not done our due diligence before taking action.
However, acquiring more and more good information without actually using any of it is just another means of procrastination.
In the end, information and intelligence are only as good as the action we take because of them.
We should keep this in mind as we prepare to do any kind of research.
Before we begin gathering and studying any kind of information on a subject we hope to eventually take action on, we should take a moment to consider at what point we will have enough information from which to act.
We need a stopgap.
We need to know when enough is going to be enough.
We need to decide when, if we are not really making any progress, we should get off the proverbial pot and do something.
This means making a decision early on in the process to remove our excuses for inaction before we even make them.
Excuses love to masquerade as good intentions.
Our job, then, is to not allow ourselves to be fooled by ourselves.
It is important to have some medium through which we are able to express ourselves.
Much of our life these days is spent on the receiving end of information.
We are bombarded with input and spend endless hours consuming other people’s ideas, opinions, and agendas.
It is easy to forget that we are creative beings.
While observation of and participation in the world is an important aspect of human existence, so is creative output.
Input allows us to be aware of and to understand our environment, society, and culture, but creative output gives us a voice within these and a means by which to change them, ideally for the better.
We are not here merely to be recipients of input, receivers of data, and followers of influence.
We are here to be influencers ourselves.
We are here to create.
Creativity, like all skills, requires practice, however.
It requires that we practice stepping back, processing our experience, and transforming that experience into something new, different, and maybe even useful.
We do not all have to be artists, musicians, or writers, but we do need a healthy, positive way to express our ideas, our feelings, and our unique perspective on some or all aspects of life so that our life is truly our own.
Holistic Budo: As it is in budo, so too it is in life. As it is in life, so too it is in budo.
Robert Van Valkenburgh is co-founder of Taikyoku Mind & Bodyand Kogen Dojo where he teaches Taikyoku Budo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
All photos by Robert Van Valkenburgh unless otherwise noted.
“I have never seen a situation where you shouted people down and convinced them you were right.”
—Ann Miura-Ko
Cherry Blossoms blooming in Washington DC, a gift from Japan
We live in an era wherein nearly any and all information is available to us all of the time. It is literally ‘at our fingertips.’ It is no longer a matter of if you can know something. We can know anything. There are no secrets. In fact, there is so much information, simultaneously true and false, in the info-sphere that it is often overwhelming and confusing, making it difficult to know what and who to believe. For better or worse, this tends to lead us to believe that which agrees with our already tightly held viewpoints and ideologies.
With all of the information out there, we have the dubious luxury to pick and choose what we want to believe and what we want to espouse as truth. It is like a dogmatic version of Choose Your Own Adventure. Instead of being open to new ideas, listening to others’ perspectives, and gauging our conclusions on whether or not they are based in fact, we have resorted to basing our opinions on whether or not they align with our beliefs and feelings. We bounce from idea to idea, opinion to opinion, and outrage to outrage, in a constant state of overstimulation and irritation.
We have forgotten that there is deep truth inside each of us. We have forgotten to be quiet and still, letting that truth reveal itself. We have forgotten how to truly see each other, hear each other, and be with each other. We have forgotten that nothing we think or do or say is right or righteous without compassion or empathy guiding it. We do not need more information. We do not need more news. We do not need more data. We need more space for ourselves and for those around us to breathe, to be who we are, and to express our deepest and realest truth.
“As in life, so too it is in budo. As in budo, so too it is in life.”
Meditations on God 