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On Knowledge & Understanding
You know the sky is blue, but do you understand why it is?
Noah Jacobs
September 17, 2023
On Knowledge & Understanding
2023.09.17
Lindy Expectancy: 24 Weeks
To me, knowing something and understanding it are two related but ultimately different things.
Compared to understanding, knowledge is much more obtainable; if I tell you the sky is blue, you now know the sky is blue (if you somehow didn’t already). If you want to truly understand why the sky is blue, it might take a bit more work.
Wisdom
People have beliefs. People share those beliefs. If we think those beliefs are rooted in lived experience and truth, we might call those beliefs wisdom.
Two ways I collect wisdom are by listening to people who I believe are wiser than me and by reading books by people who I believe are wiser than me.
Below are some examples I’m fond of right now. The cited source is who I heard it from first.
“Think big, act small.”
“If you don’t know what you want, the chances that you’ll get it are extremely low.”
“Everything I do is predicated on the assumption that they’ll be another deal.”
“Level 5 leaders display a workmanlike diligence—more plow horse than show horse.”
“Pay [for quality] now or pay later.”
“Clarity is the goal… Clarity is what separates a mathematical argument from a hand waving philosophical one.”
“If something’s ‘too good to be true,’ it probably is.”
All of that sounds awesome. I have knowledge of these quotes, and now you do, too. That doesn’t mean I understand them, though. I’m working on it, but for many of them, I’m not entirely there yet.
Understanding is not knowing.
Two On One
Within maybe my first five hours of training jiu-jitsu, one of the phrases I heard shouted was, “Two on One!” This suggestion is exactly what it sounds like: it is an encouragement to control one of your opponents limbs with two of yours.
General BJJ heuristic: if a random black belt can charge $70 for an instructional on a topic, it’s probably important.
It’s peppered all throughout the sport and perfectly encapsulates the ever present idea of asymmetry: if you break any jiu-jitsu match down to different positions, you’ll often find that the person who is successful at progressing uses some form of leverage to advance. This is true regardless of strength.
Leverage and asymmetry are one of the core tenants of the sport, and two on one encapsulates that dual mandate very well. For over a year, I heard two on one shouted, I knew what it meant, but I didn’t understand it.
Grip Fighting
Perhaps 15 months into my training, we were rolling (live training). I was seated in butterfly guard and my coach was walking around the mats. I was holding one of my training partners wrist with one of my own hands, and my coach instinctively, said “Two on one.” I reached out and brought my other hand to the grip fight.
Now, I had two on one.
My opponent was a bit bigger than me, but there was no chance he was going to remove his single hand from both of mine, unless he brought his free hand to the table. At that point, I would no longer have two on one, but I would have a slew of new options.
The control was, for lack of better words, awesome. For the rest of the matches, I focused on grabbing one of my training partner’s wrists with two of my hands. It was like magic–if they didn’t understand two on one, I could drag them around with ease. Even if they did understand it, it forced them to respond, opening up plenty of doors.
I even had one less experienced grappler ask me that night how my wrist control was so strong.
I am strong, but I’m not that strong. It’s simply asymmetry. Now, going for two on one is a staple in my toolkit.
The catch is, it only took me 15 months of “knowing” I should be doing it to actually start doing it.
Ignoring Advice
Even though I had heard “two on one” what felt like a million times without acting on it, I wasn’t ‘ignoring’ advice, per se. Rather, it just hadn’t clicked yet… I may have ‘known’ two on one, but I didn’t necessarily understand it until that ‘aha’ moment.
Before that point, I could have been asked what two on one meant, and I could have explained it in a pretty compelling way. But, it wasn’t real to me until I started using it.
Back to the wisdom. Take the Horowitz quote: “If you don’t know what you want, the chances that you’ll get it are extremely low.” I know this piece of wisdom very well and have repeated it to others; however, I’m still coming to understand it.
Sometimes I’ll go into a business call with just a general idea of what I might want; an advisor gave me a sheet to fill out with the minimum and maximum desired outcomes. This is perspective changing in the sense that it puts all of the agency on you–you know what you want…
Interdisciplinary
A side note that warrants its own piece–I wonder if my understanding of two on one in BJJ clicked after I had a better understanding of asymmetry in other contexts of my life; moreover, I wonder if my understanding of two on one in BJJ is helping my understanding of asymmetry elsewhere.
A thought from Munger:
“You must know the big ideas in the big disciplines and use them routinely – all of them, not just a few. Most people are trained in one model – economics, for example – and try to solve all problems in one way. You know the old saying: To the man with a hammer, the world looks like a nail. This is a dumb way of handling problems.”
Becoming Who You Are
Gaining a true understanding of anything is always going to be a long & arduous battle.
I think it’s a mix of hearing and learning aphorisms and wisdom and ways of viewing the world, and then either using them to label the learnings from your own experience or using them as a mold to fill with your experience.
We’re a beautiful mosaic of the information we consume and the things we experience, some hodgepodge of shared wisdom and life itself. Sometimes, the struggle shows us that the perceived wisdom was not actually wisdom; other times, the experience is the only thing that can make the wisdom real.
A pitfall in my own life I’m working on overcoming is knowing something and overestimating my ability to understand it. Advice, books, teachers, class–they give us knowledge. To build up an intuitive understanding of anything, however, takes a lot of time.
We don’t often get to hear something and immediately make significant improvements. Patience is key.
As always, thanks for reading. Everything you do matters and adds up to who you are, even the advice you receive.
Live Deeply,
