Let me begin with a simple, wonderfully freeing premise: You do not need to know everything.
A few short generations ago, it could rightly be said, Information Is Power. That was true when there wasn’t enough of it. Today, the motto should read: Information Is Fatigue. We get too much information, and a high percentage of that information is inane, meaningless, enervating. Do I really need to know whom Anne Heche is dating?
Writes Richard Saul Wurman, in Information Anxiety 2 (Que, 2001): “Information was once a sought-after and treasured commodity like a fine wine. Now, it’s regarded more like crabgrass, something to be kept at bay.”
No, information alone is no longer power. What is power is the right information, a limited amount of information—the information you need, when you need it.
The fact we must focus our learning should be self-evident, but for many years, I struggled to believe it. Growing up, I admired DaVinci, Benjamin Franklin, and other polymaths who excelled in multiple fields. I felt the gold crown of knowledge rested on those whose learning ranged across disciplines: Blaise Pascal, Desiderius Erasmus, Albert Schweitzer. I chose a liberal-arts college because I believed in being well-rounded.
But whatever understandable forces create the longing to be a Renaissance scholar, guess what? We don ‘t live during the Renaissance. In fact, “Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare, is regarded by historians as the last person to know everything in the world. Since then, each of us learns a progressively smaller percentage of all the information that exists.”1
You and I live during a time when the universe of knowledge has exploded—giant galaxies of learning are expanding and streaming apart. My favorite search engine, Google, currently indexes 3,083,324,652 web pages. My mind can’t comprehend that very number, let alone those pages’ content. And this number of web pages nearly tripled in 18 months. I can’t know everything.
Theologically, this truth keeps me humble and dependent on others. Practically, it frees me to concentrate my learning in key areas. I can always ask others about what I don’t know, and no one should be afraid to do that. Ignorance is not a sin; acting like you know something when you don’t, is.
Ah, but here’s the rub: How do you determine which areas of learning not to concentrate on? What information can you neglect with impunity?
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A business executive struggles with this: “I live in the general world of marketing,” he says, “but there are multiple disciplines of marketing, including graphic design, print direct-mail marketing, email marketing, CRM software, marketing strategy, etc. I need to be an expert, but I can’t be an expert in everything. How do I select which discipline to drill down in?”
Here how. Each person’s answer will vary, but by answering these 5 questions, you will develop your unique answer.
Is there someone else who is expert on this-or could be?
If the answer is yes, then how knowledgeable do you really need to be?
Solo pastors or start-up entrepreneurs may need to be the expert on copier repair or mailing permits, for no one else has the time or energy to be. But in general, if anyone else knows (or would enjoy finding out) the details, why should I?
My work, for example, involves overseeing five paid-content websites, so I need to know about changes in the online world. But I’ve decided I don’t need to be an online savant; other staff can be. I need only be conversant enough to ask them intelligent questions. This decision saves me hours of reading every month.
There is a price to this distributed-knowledge approach, however. It means sometimes I have to admit, “I don’t know; ask So-and-so,” which can be mildly embarrassing. But Peter Drucker explains that “Once beyond the apprentice stage, knowledge workers must know more about their job than their boss does—or what good are they?” This approach empowers staff and colleagues: they are the experts, and I have to trust their knowledge.
One manager says, “I gradually learned the most effective strategy was to find out the knowledge level of my staff—and rely on all they knew in specific areas. By looking to my staff to be the experts, I reduced the clutter in my thinking and could focus on learning the things that only I was responsible for.”
If someone else can be expert in something, you probably don’t need to make that your key learning area.
Can questions in this information area be looked up relatively quickly?
Have you heard the (possibly apocryphal) story of the student who asked Albert Einstein, “Dr. Einstein, how many feet are there in a mile?”
Einstein said he didn’t know.
The student assumed he had to be joking, but when pressed for an explanation, Einstein answered, “I make it a rule not to clutter my mind with simple information that I can find in a book in five minutes.”
Hey, if Einstein was right about the Theory of General Relativity, I figure he’s probably right about this. Why study something that can be readily retrieved?
In college, I studied Koine’ Greek for two years and Attic Greek for a summer. The implied promise: I would be able to open the Greek New Testament and-voila!-discover a new shade of meaning, an undiscovered nuance in the Koine’ text. I finally realized something, though. The scholars had already done that. Greek commentaries have been written by experts-teams of experts—who specialize in ancient languages and have their work reviewed by peers. So why was I studying to become expert in reading Greek? I could buy the works of the language experts and quickly look up the information I needed, so that information didn’t need to reside in my brain.
In my work as a leader today, I oversee a sizable budget with multiple accounts. People expect me to know it. But the truth is, I don’t really know it (except in broad terms), and I don’t need to. I keep a thick, blue notebook with financial budgets and reports, and when someone asks me a question, I simply pull out the notebook.
You don’t need to know if you know where to look it up.
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| “Sorry, Doctor Jones won’t be able to see you today. He has paralysis of analysis.” |
Is this topic essential for decisions I’m making now or in the near future?
Years ago I visited Leith Anderson, pastor of Wooddale Church near Minneapolis, when the church was building its current sanctuary. As we walked through the construction site, Leith pointed to one wall that would form the back of the sanctuary. “See that?” he asked. “We had to ask for special, rubber, sound-absorbing insulation on that wall, because there’s a rest room on the opposite side, and we didn’t want the sound of a flush to reverberate into the sanctuary during a quiet moment in worship.”
Verily, I’d never thought of that.
Yet Leith knew the fine points of construction: whether the insulation needed to be 3/4 or 3/8, the relative advantages of large brick vs. small brick, the material costs per square foot. “I’ve learned what I’ve needed to as we’ve faced major decisions,” he explained. “Before next month’s board meeting, I’m going to learn everything I can about educational classrooms.”
For Leith, minute knowledge of construction practices was necessary, but only for a limited time. Once the building was built, he could forget most of what he’d studied. The key principle: Learn what you need for the decisions you’re making now.
What subjects do the most-important people around me depend on me to know?
What does my boss (this may be a board, stockholders or constituents) legitimately expect me to stay on top of?
Try to answer that question for yourself. My boss rightly expects me to stay on top of: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.
The problem is that we almost always list too many subjects they expect us to know. We don’t narrow enough. Can you shorten your list?
An entrepreneur I know learned this lesson the hard way. She would work all day, raising capital, launching the business, dealing with cash flow. Then at night she would try to read a dozen business and trade publications. “I’d rip out the articles to read whenever I had the time,” she says. “Problem was, I never seemed to have to time to get to all those articles, either.”
The solution came in narrowing the list of subjects studied, narrowing to the precious few her investors depended on her to know: e-commerce and marketing. “It made more sense for me to just focus on a finite area of the industry and leave the rest behind. Little by little I stopped subscribing to the periodicals, especially the ones that stacked up faster than the rest. (It helped that some of those periodicals went out of business!)”
Yes, some topics you truly need to know, because people depend on you to know them. But that list is probably much smaller than you’d think.
Does this area fit my life’s calling and major strengths?
Fred Smith, winner of the Lawrence Appley Award for excellence in business, has taught, “When I know the ultimate purpose of my life, I can know whether I’m using my time properly. If I do not know that ultimate purpose, I have no way of judging my efficiency.”2
I take that to heart. I must first know the ultimate purpose of my life.
Only then can I determine where to invest my learning time. I should learn the areas of knowledge that help express the ultimate purpose of my life. I should study in my areas of strength. This sounds self-evident, but I find people generally disregard it.
Why? Here are reasons I hear:
- “I feel my weaknesses more acutely; I need to shore up those.”
- “My strengths come naturally to me, so I don’t need to study in those areas.”
- “I feel guilty just reading about what I enjoy.”
I understand those reasons. I’ve even read a book on information overload that manages only 11 pages before it advocates to list your areas of “self-improvement: what I am not very good at and need/want to improve.”
I disagree. In my opinion, life is too short for me to be constantly shoring up weaknesses. I’ll never fix them all. How much more productive to recognize and build on my strengths. Thus, I choose my learning areas largely by gift-areas of talent or strength, the capacities that God seems to regularly use me in.
According to several assessment tools, my primary strengths are teaching, wisdom, and leadership. So I read regularly and without apology in the areas of teaching and preaching, decision making, and leadership. I study books with titles like Biblical Preaching or Courageous Leadership. I want to do better what I’m supposed to be doing with my life.
Why should I select as a key learning area something in which I can, at best, be only pretty good? You can teach a dog to ride a pony, but it will never win a rodeo. Ben Patterson, a college chaplain and author I like, puts it this way: “I would rather know a few things well than a lot of things pretty well. I’m told this happens when we get older. I’m more accepting of what my genuine interests and strengths are, and I’m going with those.”3
So my advice is to pretty much ignore your weaknesses and study in your areas of strength. If you do this, your will learn faster and enjoy it more. Richard Saul Wurman explains that before learning can take place, “there must be interest. You can’t get lost on the road to interest.”4
1. Richard A. Swenson, M.D., The Overload Syndrome: Learning to Live Within Your Limits (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1998)
2. Fred Smith, Learning to Lead: Bringing Out the Best in Others (Waco, TX: Leadership/Word, 1986)
3. Ben Patterson “Breadth before Depth,” in “Managing the Information Overload,” Leadership (Volume XVI, No. 2, Spring 1995), pp. 122-23
Click to read Selecting Your Key Information Areas – Part Two
Kevin A. Miller is vice president of resources for Christianity Today International, editor-at-large of Leadership Journal, and executive editor for PreachingToday.com. He is the author of numerous periodical articles as well as the books Secrets of Staying Power and More Than You and Me.
