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Welcome to the Potential Leader Lab. I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. And today we're exploring the idea around the chasm between knowing and doing. Now, everything that I do, as you know, is through the E Three Framework. And that means we leverage, exploring, experimenting, and evolving as our means of navigating our leadership odyssey. Now, my definition of leadership is merely having a positive impact on the lives of those we care about. Now, I believe in this definition, every single one of us has both the opportunity and responsibility to lead in whatever part of the world it makes the most sense for us to do so. And also on top of that, if we all individually take these opportunities, then collectively we can make the world a better place. And that's a pretty cool thing. And let's get started. Here are three quotes to kick us off about the gap. I'll call it the chasm between knowing and doing. The first one is from Scott Birkin. People tell me this is obvious, but it's okay to be obvious. Knowing and doing are different.
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Many people know many obvious things they completely fail to do despite their knowledge. And then Robin Sharma said, knowing what to do and not doing it is the same as not knowing what to do. And then this one by Eric Maisel is really interesting to me. The three elements of creativity are thus loving, knowing, and doing. Or heart, mind and hands. Or as Zen Buddhist teaching has it, great faith, great question, great courage. And so loving, knowing and doing is great faith, great question, and great courage. All right, so here we go. Let's explore a little bit. Knowing and doing. The first and foremost, the thing that I believe is at the root of all this is we try to do too much too fast. And I guess that's a hard stop. I work with a lot of organizations, and almost all the time the list of things that they have assigned themselves to do is far too many things. And so when we get back to the chasm between knowing and doing, there is an issue because when our list becomes so overwhelming, things can't get done. It isn't that the people nobody doesn't want to do anything.
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First of all, they're all working a normal job. And so there's a couple fallacies here. There's a couple of cognitive biases that come into play that I think are really important. Number one is the planning fallacy, right? So the planning fallacy is a cognitive bias that describes people's tendency to underestimate the amount of time, cost and risk of future actions while overestimating the benefits of the actions. I'll give you a real this is a really stark example, but the construction of the Sydney Opera House in Australia when the project was first proposed in 1957, they estimated it would cost about 5 million Australian dollars and be completed by 1963. So 1967 going to cost 5 million be completed in 63. So six years, the project ended up costing over $70 million and taking 14 years. So it's going to cost 5 million, cost 70,000,075 to 70, and then was going to be done in 63 and was done in 14 years. Leader which would have been 71. So an additional eight years. It took eight years and an additional, what, $65 million. That's a real life example of the planning fallacy. Now, I'm going to tell you, we could write a book on all the ones we know about that look similar to that. And again, it's a cognitive bias.
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This means this happens enough that they've studied it and gave it a name. But yet I can't tell you how frustrating this is when you try to help people, because we know we don't do. And knowing and not doing is not knowing, as Robin Sharma said, because this exists, the planning fallacy exists. It's a cognitive bias that we underestimate time, cost and risk and overestimate the benefit. And it happens every year, over and over and over again with organizations large and small and individuals. We overestimate the benefit and we underestimate what it's actually going to require to do it. And then the impact that has on us as humans is horrendous. I met with an organization the other day and they were talking about their strategic initiatives for 2023, and the person was telling me that was on the leadership team. Hey, yeah, we met and the four of us got together and we have this list. Each of us has like four to six things and we're getting together next week, talk about it. I said, oh, well, what are the dates? There's no dates. We haven't got that far yet. And we're going to meet with the bigger team and tell them how things are going. And I said, wow, that's interesting.
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How are you going to do that since you guys don't know how it's going? He said, oh, I don't know. We'll have to figure that out next week before we meet with the so you have a leadership team. They've listed initiatives. Now, there's now, remember, I don't know about the numbers, the integrity of the numbers, because he was just off top of his head. But he said, we all have four to six things. There's four of them. So that means anywhere from 16 to 24 things they're working on collectively that are, by the way, in addition to their jobs, like these are strategic initiatives that they're trying to get off the ground. And none of them can do them by themselves. Like, they need other people on the team to help them with all of those things because there's something that flows through the company. It isn't just a small little project or task. So they've decided the four of them are going to do anywhere from 16 to 24 things this year. And as of April, none of them, I don't think any of them were done and there weren't even due dates on them. They just had to be done by the end of the year. Again, just think about this in context of what you do on a daily basis for yourself.
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What's your to do list look like, how many things are you going to achieve? How quickly are you going to get them done? Right? And the there's also sampling bias, which is a bias that we come to conclusions based on inaccurate sample size. And I view that as sample size of one. Like, we don't ask anybody else what they think. We don't think about what it's going to cost to do these things. We make these decisions in a vacuum, sort of, or in an echo chamber of maybe one or two or three people, and we don't give honest feedback. We just get wrapped up in the excitement of, oh, yeah, we'll get all that done. Yes, that has to get done. It needs to get done. I hear people say that all the time. We have to do it. What does that mean, you have to do it? Because I can tell you, 90% of the time, when they tell me they have to get something done later, it doesn't get done.
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So it didn't have to get done. It sounded like it would have been nice if it got done, but it didn't have to get done. Now, here's some reasons that we don't get things done. Number one, fear. We're afraid because if it's something that we've put out there that we want to do, we're afraid to do it because it's going to require a change, right? And there's also the risk of perfectionism. Like, when we're going to do something, it has to be done perfectly. Like, we've set a goal for ourselves and that's it. Anything less than that is pure abject failure. So no wonder we're scared because we're looking at this thing, we're looking at our history going, Well, I don't know, I don't want to be a failure. So what are we really fearful of? We're fearful of how we're going to feel. We're fearful of what we're going to think and what others are going to think when we don't reach the goal. Because the goal is all or nothing. And most likely we've created this thing where there's got to be a perfect scenario for us to achieve it, because we're also another reason we don't do this is we compare ourselves to other.
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Roosevelt said comparison is the thief of joy. You got to look back and go, why is this even the goal? Like, why do we want to do this? Is it because we want to do it? Or because X, Y and Z company is doing it? Or our neighbors are doing it, or my friends doing it, or my spouse wants me to do it? Whatever that is, right? Are we doing it out of a compare some others, so fear, perfectionism, comparison of others, lack of planning. For some reason, we think we can just do stuff. We don't need to write anything out. We don't need to think it through. It's just, oh, that's something we're going to do. I'll just start doing it. We'll get it done. I'll put it on my list.
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Most of the things that are meaningful in our life require thought. They require us to think through what we're going to do. Now that has a limit. And that's the next bias I'm going to talk about, because we talked about sampling bias, we talked about planning fallacy. Now we're going to talk about information bias. This is at the top of the list for me personally, and I don't know how many people have actually heard of information bias, but it's a cognitive bias to seek information when it does not affect action. People can often make better decisions and choices with less information. More information is not always better. An example of information bias is believing that the more information can be acquired to make a decision, the better, even if that extra information is irrelevant to the decision. What that means is we go around studying things, finding more information, because at some point, once we get enough information, the decision will be perfect. It's substituting thinking and learning for doing. And again, we cannot think our way into a new way of acting. We must act our way into a new way of thinking. There's only so much thinking that works. I'll go back and say, yes, we do have to write things down.
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We have to plan them out. We have to be aware, which I'm going to talk about in a few minutes, about how to do that. We have to give those things their time and their due, and we have to think through contingencies. We have to think about resources, which we'll get to in a minute, but at some point we have to do it. The difference between knowing and doing is that trigger. At some point, it flips over into, okay, we know enough now we must do now. It's interesting that the Greeks, the ancient Greeks had a term for this. It was called a crazier. And it's a state of acting against your better judgment. It's when you do one thing even though you know you should be doing something else. Actually, loosely translated, it's procrastination or lack of self control. A crazy is what prevents you from following through on what you set out to do. Again, procrastination, lack of self control. And this is everybody. This is all of us to a certain extent.
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This is not trying to make anybody feel bad. Information is powerful, right? We have to understand ourselves because that's the biggest gap between knowing and doing is individually. What is your process now? I think we've talked about a lot of reasons. I think one of the main reasons is summed up by David Foster Wallace, his quote on leaders. He says, real leaders are people who help us overcome the limitations of our own individual. Here's the list laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear to get us to do better, harder things than we could ever get ourselves to do on our own. The list. Remember he said, laziness, selfishness, weakness, and fear. Laziness, selfishness, weakness, and fear. That's it. That's what we have to overcome in order to go from knowing to doing. Laziness, selfishness, weakness, and fear. We all have them to varying degrees.
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nd it's okay, by the way, to have them. It's okay to struggle against our own laziness, our own selfishness and our weakness and our fear. It isn't to overcome them. It's to actively struggle against them that we got to do. We're never going to be free of them. We never whip them. It's every day we wake up and we do it every day. We wake up and acknowledge that they're there and we take action despite them, not because we don't have them anymore. It's because we're willing to acknowledge that they're there and address it. So if we move into the experiment phase of this and we think about, okay, what do we do? Right? Well, figure out something you want to accomplish. But then the second part of that that I want you to spend some time on. Why? Why do you want to do it?
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You have to have a meaningful why. And here's why. You have to have a why because it's hard fucking work to do anything that's meaningful. It's a long slog. And so whatever it is that you're going to do, there has to be something meaningful and moving reason for you to do it. Because in those days because your willpower is not going to be enough to do it, it just won't. You have to have some compelling reason that pulls you in that direction. And my own opinion is it really has to be about somebody other than you. Because we typically will do things for other people if it's driven by the caring for other people or doing something for someone else. We'll usually do that when we don't do it for ourselves, for whatever reason that is. But we have to understand that all things like this, all goals that we have, will require a change in behavior. Full stop. If you've got something meaningful in your life you want to do, it will require a change in your behavior. And that is the hardest thing. Any sentient human being, any sentient being I guess human being would be redundant.
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Any sentient being will do is a change in behavior. But that's what it requires to achieve the things you want to achieve in life. Because newsflash, if it didn't, you'd already be doing it and you're not. Again, no judgment. It's just let's be realistic. Let's be real, or let's not play, okay, let's not dance around. Let's not try to strive to make each other feel good, right? We're not going to invest in a lot of emotional or financial novocaine here. We're going to address the core issues. And the core issues are if you want something, it's well within your reach to get, so long as it's realistic. And by the way, the next piece of this is don't do too many things because it's going to require changes in behavior. You have to expend a lot of energy, focus, right? So make sure that you're doing something that is meaningful, one thing at a time, especially if they're for you personally. You can't completely revamp who you are on multiple fronts. You cannot fight a battle on two fronts.
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That goes if you're a person, a department, an organization, whatever, you have to direct resources. And everybody, as far as I know, within earshot of my voice, is going to have limited resources. Just fact of life. It's okay, nothing wrong with it. But unless you have a compelling why, it will not work. That's it. Now, next step, determine an appropriate pipeline timeline. I mean, remember this. Remember this is going to be an addition to your life, your work, your family, your fun, all that stuff, right? You're engaging in something either as an individual or as a company that's going to require resources. Figure out what's a realistic timeline because this isn't as far as I know, you haven't removed anything from your plate. You're adding, I mean, something as simple as adopting a healthier lifestyle. That's a lot of work. And you're adding work. It isn't taking away is what we'd like it to do is what are we taking away to make it easier but we're actually adding on in order to take away later.
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You have to recognize that's what we're doing, we're adding workload when we have a goal we want to accomplish that didn't exist before. We're adding workload. In order to do that, we have to figure out an appropriate timeline to put ourselves in a position to be successful. And then after that, what are the resources we're going to need? Do we need money? Do we need time? Do we need people support? Do I need more energy? What do I need in order to achieve this? Who, what, and how am I going to get that? And I have to be ready to commit those resources. Now, here's a big one, right? If you require support, you may actually need other people to be part of this process for you, even as an individual. If you want to adopt a healthier lifestyle and you have a family, guess what? They're going to have to be on board with this change because your change impacts them.
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There's a great I don't know where it is. I think it might have been in here that if you're dancing with a dance partner and you decide to change the dance to a different dance. You have to let them know or they're going to fall flat on their face. You can't just change dances midstream and expect them to figure out what you're doing. And so when you're talking about committing resources, you also should honestly look at, what am I going to stop doing? Do I need to stop some things in order to create time and energy and resources to achieve this new goal? Because again, great strategies take away. They don't add. You can't every year just keep adding and adding and adding. You don't have unlimited resources. Time being the biggest one and energy being second. Be realistic with yourself. If it's important and you have a major why. The other part of that is the timeline doesn't matter. It is not a sprint.
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If you're making substantive changes that are meaningful to your life or your organization, those things are going to be there for a long time. You have to be able to determine if you have the sustainable resources to do this. Again, do I envision doing it? Can we do it for a week? Can we do it for a month? Can we do it for a quarter? Can we do it for a year? Whatever we're proposing, imagine it on your worst day. Imagine the thing that you're going to need to do on the worst day. Will you do it when you get up late, you don't have any coffee, you slept poorly, you binged on Netflix, all of those things and you roll in and that thing's sitting there staring you in the face. Are you going to do it on that day? Are you going to do it not on your best day. And again, back to the planning fallacy. We underestimate and overestimate, right? Typically we overestimate our own ability, our own willingness, because we're very excited about it while we're talking about it, while we're all in the room together with the whiteboard, we're very excited.
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Three weeks from now when the shit goes sideways and you got four people screaming at you and emails from upset clients and your kids need something at school and your spouse is late, are you going to do it then? What's that look like then? Because that's the life. Because the world ain't perfect and the world doesn't give one shit what you want. It never has and it never will. You're not in control of the world. You never have been. You never will be. You have to construct it so that it works for you. Will you do it on your worst day? Now, after you answer those questions, here comes the biggest part of this equation. Create a system or process that you're going to commit to doing. Again, not willpower, not I'll figure it out. None of that horse shit. Figure out a process or a system that you can use.
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Now, my recommendation is that you find somebody else's because there's already one out there probably don't try to create all this stuff on your own. There's other ones out there that, while not perfect, are really good enough. Really, really good enough. If you have the humility to adopt them, will they be perfect? No, they're not going to perfectly fit. Are they good enough? Hell yes. They're far better than you trying to come up with one on your own, because if you start down that road, it's going to be a constant tweaking of, oh well, can it do this, can it do that? I want it to do this, I want that. Okay? All that doesn't matter. What matters is use the damn system. Just buy into the system. Don't try to make changes right away. It's always funny because people get hired at companies, and routinely we have this conversation.
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They hire somebody with experience, and immediately, in two weeks, the person wants to make six changes to the organization. And I tell everybody I work with, I'm like, hey, just tell them this. Tell them that you want them to work there six months before, six months before they give their first suggestion. And the reason I say that is just learn how we do things. Learn, talk to people. Understand how the organization works, understand how the department works before you start recommending changes, because then you'll learn what you can and can't change, how difficult it could be to change something. We still want your feedback. We just want it in context of reality, and you lack that. If you haven't worked in the system for a while, how are you going to overcome obstacles? Talk about them. You know what they are. There's a great exercise, red Team, thinking they have something called a pre mortem. And you sit down, you say, okay, this is our goal. You're sitting with your leadership team saying, this is what we're going to accomplish this year, right? Yes.
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Okay, let's imagine we're sitting here next year of this exact day, and we're talking about how we failed to accomplish this thing, what went wrong? And usually everybody in the room just starts rambling off all the things that could go wrong. And it's like, wow, okay, awesome. Now we have the list. Let's figure out what we're going to do about those things. But unless you ask the question, nobody's going to volunteer that information. So be open and honest about obstacles. Again, let's not be polyannash about this. We don't need to see the world through rose colored glasses. We need to see it clearly. Leaders have a very profound relationship with reality. It's imperative we have a profound relationship with reality. We don't get emotional about it. We are objective about it. Let's talk about what possibly could come up, because if we talk about it now, we have a plan for it later, then think about how you're going to measure progress.
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What are the metrics? What does done look like? Starting is not finishing. I run into that all the time with people. Just because we started something doesn't mean it's finished. How long until it's fully integrated into who we are? Until it is a way of life for us, then it's finished. Then we can move on to the next thing. Once we've internalized it, once we've made it a habit, once we've smoothed out all the rough edges and everybody's doing it, once we've got metrics and we can see three, six, nine months later. Yep, here, here's the change in, in performance we were looking for. I would recommend you start small and build momentum. Don't try to eat an elephant all at once. Eat it in small bites. And then the final thing I'll tell you about this and the thing I really want you to think about is once you come up with a goal, for those of you that are listening to me before, you know I don't really like goals. I'm not a big fan of goals.
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Goals are great for setting direction. What the goal needs is a system, a process. Once you have the goal and you've created a system or process or adopted a system or process around it, forget the goal, work the system. The goal will take care of itself. The goal is no longer meaningful. What's meaningful is the system or the process? The goal sets direction. The system or process ensures success. Because if you've lined those things up correctly every day we can talk about the system and the process. Those are things we can do. Those are things we have control of because we have control of our behavior and our activity. We don't have control of the goal. To talk about the goal every day is not motivating. And again, if we just the Gap in the Gain by Ben Hardy right? Don't live in the gap, live in the gain.
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Because we don't want to chase that horizon all the time. If we're constantly talking about how far away we are instead of how far we've come. Again, simple as a leader, you're trying to impact the emotional states of those you care about, right? You want to make the world a better place for those you care about. People don't want to constantly hear about how they're failing. They don't want to hear about how far away they are from the goal. They want to hear about how far they've come from the starting point. It's the exact same discussion from a different point of view. The same three components are still there starting point, current state, past state, current state, desired state. Those three elements are in both of these discussions. In one of the discussions I'm talking about how far away I am from my desired state. In the other discussion, I'm talking about how far we've come from the past state, from the starting point. Which do you think is more motivating? Research will tell you it's the second, not the first, to constantly tell somebody how far they need to go. We're almost there, but you did a great job, but great quarter.
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But instead of saying, look at how this is where we started, this is where we're at. Awesome. Let's replicate those things. That means the processor system is working. Let's keep at it. Because eventually then what happens is we achieve the objective. But that isn't as important as looking at the processor system because I think I forget. The downside of setting a goal is achieving it. Because you might be able to blow by the goal if you focus all your energy and focus on the system. If the system works, the goal might have been far understated. Isn't that awesome? Not only now, but later. That's why systems and processes are so crucial, because they're the only thing that's scalable. I mean, your goal is to have those things exist for yourself so that you don't need tons of willpower and insight and intellect. If you run an organization, you want to be able to have a system or process that gets extraordinary results from ordinary people.
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Because that's what we all are, ordinary people. If the results of your organization reside or require extraordinary purple unicorns, holy shit, you're in trouble. You want to take normal, ordinary people and enable them to produce extraordinary results. That's scalable. Same thing for yourself. You got to create a system that an ordinary human can do. You want to create a process that a normal human can do for whatever it is your plan is. For whatever it is your goal is. If my goal is to have a healthy lifestyle, I'm not going to start off by saying, okay, I'm 35 years old, we got three kids, two people working on I'm going to spend 8 hours a week in the gym. It's not realistic. You're not going to do it. And if you do it, shame on you. Because now look at the rest of your life that's suffering. Be realistic about what you're going to do. Create a process or system that's sustainable for you.
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That's all that matters. Then start working the system or the process. Forget the goal. The goal is now to work the system. That's how this works. All right, I'll get three quotes to get us out of here. Here's by W. Clement Stone thinking will not overcome fear, but action will. Remember that's one of the top things that stop us from getting from knowing to doing is fear. Thinking will not overcome fear. In fact, I would say thinking generates more fear because the more you think about it, all of the shit that comes up in your head, none of it is positive. I would guarantee if you actually wrote down all the things you said to yourself, all the thoughts you had in your head for a week about yourself, and then read them at the end of the week, you would not be friends with that. Person thinking will not overcome fear, but action will. This one from Joan Baez is one of my favorites. I say it all the time.
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To people, action is the antidote to despair. No matter how you feel, doing something makes you feel better. Thinking about it never makes you feel better. And then Peter Drucker said, follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action. Because the last thing I'll share with you is thinking and doing is a polarity. It isn't an either or. You have to do both. You just have to know. And if you you can look up polarity management on your own. But when you're talking about thinking and doing, they're on different sides of that polarity. You have to balance them. And you have to figure, when is it enough? When is it helpful? When is it not on each side of that?
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Because you need them both. Thinking and doing are connected. Knowing and doing are connected. It's not one or the other. It's how do you do both in a way that allows you to achieve the things you need to achieve that are meaningful for you and your life and those that you care about. Because everybody can. Most people won't. Very few do. The question, as always, for everybody here is will you be one of those few? Will you do will you explore, experiment, and evolve so that you can have a positive impact on those you care about? If the answer is yes, then you're already doing it. You're already leading. And I'd like to wholeheartedly thank you because the world needs it. We need what you have to offer, and we need it now. We need more people who are willing to do the very thing that we talk about here because that makes a difference.
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Please take care of yourself and take care of each other. And I hope to see you back in the lab soon.
