Why Knowledge is Not Enough to Excel at Work
In an age of knowledge work and generative AI, what you can do with knowledge is more important than how much you know
With a simple voice command to a smartphone, we all have access to the world’s knowledge.
What anyone claims to know, to hold in their brain’s memory bank, is too often of limited value. Today we can easily ask Google or Chat GPT for roughly the same information. Much of what you know has already been commoditized.
Knowledge alone is no longer the differentiator it once was.
BraiNergy and Excelling at Higher Order Thinking is the Name of Game
Let’s Look at today’s in-demand capabilities for excelling at work.
Think carefully about this list. Overwhelmingly, the top skills needed are about higher-order thinking and not just what you know. Higher-order thinking is fuelled by knowledge and, much more importantly today, experience.
We are talking about your ability to do something important with the knowledge and observations in your head — we call that capacity BraiNergy.
We need a brain that processes better, not one that is simply filled with more stuff.
You Are Not Stuck with the Brain That God Gave You
We can all build a better brain for a longer life and career.
It’s called neuroplasticity, which is your brain’s ability rewire itself and change in important ways. You can literally train your brain to become creative or innovative, manage the increased complexity of this world, or focused on the task at hand and be less distracted (to name a few).
Best of all, we can do this at any age presuming there are no underlying health conditions that might prohibit such change (e.g., dementia, brain injury, etc.)
You Can Start Today and Strengthen Your Brain
Seeing the pathway leading us to a higher-performing brain is easy, but walking the path can be a bit of work.
- Step 1: Change your lifestyle. We need to stop the bad habits and adopt healthier ones. The fundamentals are getting enough high-quality sleep, eating a nutritious diet, getting the minimum amounts of moderately vigorous exercise each week, and managing stress. People who are tired and need coffee for a pick-me-up, eating processed food, living a sedentary life, and feeling stressed all the time will simply lack the capacity — what we call your BraiNergy — to strengthen the brain (as a metaphor, will it be easy to improve your cardio fitness if you are always exhausted? Your brain is much the same).
- Step 2: Train your brain. Things get a tiny bit tricky here. Most of the games available through smartphone apps have failed to deliver transferable benefits. This means you might get better at that specific game or brain training, but you are not better at work or home. The gains do not transport to different contexts. Therefore, you need to focus on science-backed brain training. You could join the BrainHealth Project, subscribe at Brain HQ, or turn to really great books such as Make Your Brain Smarter by Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman.
- Step 3: Cement The Changes Into Your Lifestyle. With the foundations in place, a healthier lifestyle, and regular brain training 3–4 times a week, it’s time to make some significant long-term investments in your brain. The list here would include practicing meditation each day, or taking up significantly different hobbies that challenge you (learning to play piano, a new language, or multiple forms of dance). To this list, I would include proven habit-building techniques such as JB Fogg’s Tiny Habits (I prefer Prof. Fogg’s work because he has done the research himself). One might even consider a mid-career break and a year back at school to transition into adult life’s second stage. Bottom line, these are the big investments that pay off once you have the fundamentals in place.
The Journey Will Be Rewarding But Not Always Easy
There is one definite truth about rewiring your brain as an adult — it can be hard work.
A teenager transitioning into a young adult is pretty much automatic. The growth is pretty much hard-wired into our human development and socialization. As adults, however, such development is no longer automatic.
We have to work at it.
If the research is to be believed, half to two-thirds of adults only partially or never continue their development. And here is where you find your advantage in today’s world.
You can set yourself apart, and develop the higher-order thinking capabilities listed above that help you excel and succeed, by investing in your brain.
I would never tell anyone to stop learning new knowledge. It’s fun and important.
But a head full of knowledge is highly unlikely to set you apart in today’s world where Chat GPT can regurgitate the same facts that you have.
Training your brain to be more innovative, creative, focused, strategic, and collaborative will give you advantages that technology and memorization gurus cannot yet compete with.
Start your brain training today
Just one step. Take one step today, a second tomorrow, and then a third….and pretty soon the BraiNergy gains will start to add up (see the steps image above).
