PRACTICE OVER THEORY
We live in a world where we tend to value arm chair experts over practical doers. The specific reason for this is our constant desire to narrate and explain the world around us. We find it difficult to get up every day and not have an explanation as to what has happened in our lives and what will happen in the future.
This is what we call the narrative fallacy. The explanation after the fact. Our mind can explain the same phenomenon in two extremely different ways. Just before the Iraq war the price of oil dropped, and economist explained and said it was expected. However, their own theories would have indicated that prices should have gone up. An apt definition of an economist is someone who takes something that works in practice and tries to see whether it works in theory!
Albert Einstein is considered by many to be the preeminent genius of the twentieth century. He is chiefly known for his theory of relativity, which I am not competent enough to describe but is the most complete attempt to explain the time, energy and mass continuum. He came to this theory in the main by sitting around a desk while working as a patent clerk in Switzerland and developing complex thought experiments and backing it up with complex mathematics. This idea of the thinking genius is wildly celebrated in modern life.
Looking back into history we venerate our thinkers, which is the reason people like Socrates, Plato, Aristophanes and other philosophers, are still so widely revered and quoted. We believe that their ideas are the principle reason why we as a species have progressed. We are a people of ideas and we place a huge premium on trying to develop the universal one idea, or theorem that can explain away everything in life.
This approach is greatly mistaken. Our progress is chiefly the product of tinkerers and experimenters of doers and not theorists. Practice will always triumph over theory. The discovery of fire and its use to cook food is the product of experimentation and trying things.
I bring this up in terms of life lessons because of the insidious nature of our education system. What we have developed as an education system is completely ridiculous. We place our children in school for about 18 years or so and then unleash them out to the world to obtain a livelihood. The 18 years is often composed of theories and ideas that have very little utility. Historically people became apprentices from a young age, either to a Carpenter, or a Butcher or even a Doctors or Lawyer. Nothing beats actual practice in developing the necessary skills to become an expert. We waste a lot of time. There is nothing wrong in reading but what I dislike is ending our experience there and believing we know what to do ! Reading only makes sense if we can draw practical applications from the experiences we are exposing ourselves to.
Napoleon Bonaparte the great leader developed his impressive leadership skills by reading and applying what we had learned on the battle field. He was chiefly a practitioner. Given an option choose practice over theory. The problem is many of us want to wait, to read, to be told theory and reason behind why we need to do something. That is why religion is so pervasive. We require someone to define for us what we should be doing before we do it. To succeed sometimes you just start, you do not need to know everything. This is the same way we can use electricity and mobile phones without understanding how they work. We just know that they work and that is good enough.
Life is complex and there are few linear relationships in any social sphere. You can be kind to James and kind to John and receive completely different reactions from both. The only way to know is to do it and be kind. Not trying to develop a specific theory as to why James is different from John he just is and get over it.
The Wright Brothers were bicycle repairers when they successfully developed a plane that could fly. They were ardent experimenters. They were also avid readers, but this was closely linked to experimentation. They worked hard and tried lots of things. Practice is the second cousin of failure. If you practice and experiment you will fail. That is expected. Failure is a way to obtain information about what is not the right way to do something. If you fail, you just know what not to do. Edison the inventor of the light bulb failed 10,000 times before he was successful. Many of us read the number 10,000 we cannot conceive of it but if you fail 100 times a day it will take you 100 days of trying. This equates to failing about 5 times every hour for 100 days !
The problem with relying on theory is the danger of paralysis by analysis. We tend to get static and make little to no progress because we are constantly waiting to be validated by something we have read or seen. Worse is if we are waiting for validation from social media and the opinion of others. We wait for validation. One thing is clear many people who do not understand the practice part will discourage you and ask you to give up because they confuse the seed and the tree.
The seed is where the tree comes from. Many of us stop at the point of the seed. We start the ideas , we begin implementing, then people come and observe and seeing the obvious lack of result, start advising us to give up. They will tell you to get a job so you can earn some real money if you are trying to start a business.
Theory over practice every single day is a sure way to fail. Practice requires that we are comfortable with not being comfortable. That we can work with situations where we do not know everything. Improvement cannot be a theoretical construct. That is why I promote writing my way of capturing my practice and testing my assumptions. As I write out my achievements, my failures I link them to what I know, but what is most important is what I still do not know. What do I need to learn? I get to know what I need to learn
The beauty of practice is that is takes away the prospect of worry. Dealing with the unknown makes people very nervous and worried. However, those that practice develop the ability to deal with anxiety and worry because as we do you realize that almost 99 percent of all the things we fear or worry about near happen.