“If more knowledge were the answer we would all be billionaires with six pack abs.”

I don’t know who wrote this quote but if I did I would give them credit for it. If it was you. CREDIT GIVEN.

I am not a billionaire and I do not have six pack abs. Although I feel slightly closer to achieving the latter than the former. Because I qualify for neither of these and still feel like I have a somewhat more than average amount of random knowledge I feel compelled to write this article.

I was a window cleaner, which is completely irrelevant to this article unless you understand what a window cleaner actually does…. They clean windows. That’s it. All I did was clean windows. For 8, 9, sometimes even 13 hours a day. I got so good at cleaning windows that I no longer had to focus on cleaning them, I could avert my attention to something else. I chose podcasts. 100’s of hours of podcasts. Quite literally 100’s. I would listen to all kinds of podcasts from Crimetown to Freakenomics, from The Investors Podcast to Mike Rowe’s short stories in The Way I Heard It, and the list goes on and on and on. I once listened to an entire 50 episode podcast in 3 days (Action: The Pursuit of Acting Excellence). Most of the podcasts that I dedicated my time to were business centered podcasts. You see, I had this thought that if I could just listen to enough podcasts and gather enough knowledge (I hope that didn’t sound too much like Tai Lopez) that I could begin to live this “better, more successful life”. But for the 100’s of hours I listened to, it definitely didn’t equate to the return on investment I had anticipated.

The knowledge industry is massive industry. Between books, masterclasses, podcasts and seminars I would venture to say it’s in the 6 digit billions if not trillions.

Recently I had a revelation. A revelation that hit me so deep I am compelled to write to you about it. Knowledge and the pursuit of it, is humans most vain endeavor*. Now that’s a big statement. Which is why I put that little asterisk in there. Allow me a brief moment to explain something that might change your life.

Knowledge, in my humble and simple definition is the “what”. This is “what” (insert billionaires name) did to amass this much wealth, this is “what” (insert sub human athletes name) did to become great and so on and so on and so ad nauseam . Many of us, I was included, believed that if we could just get our hands on the right “what” we would have a light bulb moment. All of the struggles that we have been experiencing would dissipate with that golden piece of information and we would sky rocket to success in our given field. The truth is, we have been spending, some of us tens of thousands of dollars a year, on the wrong thing. That’s right. We were wrong. KNOWLEDGE ISN’T THE ANSWER… but I think I know what is.

Failure.

I believe that failure is the golden ticket to success. Counter intuitive right. Failure is the key to success. I suppose that you could say that I am contradicting myself depending on your respective definitions of the terms but I still believe this to be true.

I suppose yet more explaining must be done.

In order for knowledge to be of ANY VALUE you must couple it equally with wisdom. I will define wisdom here as the “how”. “How” you do the “what” is far more important than the “what” itself. With all those 100’s of hours of “what” under my belt I rarely could articulate the “how”. Here is where failure comes in. With an infinite amount of roads to the infinite amount of definitions of success the what becomes almost entirely subjective. What worked for Zucks or Cuban or Gary Vee (ehh you like how I bunched you in with those guys. That’s how much respect I have for where you are going.) WILL MOST LIKELY NOT WORK FOR YOU. I repeat, it will most likely not work for you. Not because its bad knowledge. Gary Vaynerchuck puts out some of the absolute best “what” on the internet. But the success is in the wisdom, the “how”. To attain this wisdom, to attain this self-aware understanding of exactly how to apply the knowledge in your life, you may want to get comfortable with failure. When you fail, you have a data point to analyze and all of the sudden you have an actual thing to adjust and move forward with.

The key to the absolute most successful life may not be another piece of knowledge. It just might be a failure. A failure that teaches you the strategy to execute the “what” in an even greater way.

Or it could be Jesus.

Anyways, that’s the way I see it.