In Part One of this series (Financial Advisor, July 2018), we focused on the first half of the basic recipe for growth: increased awareness. Now we move on to action. Like the ancient symbol for yin and yang, these two halves of our lives (our internal and external journeys) are perfectly complementary, and the essence of each resides in the heart of the other. We need both knowing and doing for a dynamic and continuous spiral of growth that reinforces itself.

If we are to truly evolve and grow, it’s not enough to read about concepts. We must also incorporate them into our lives. Unless they are applied, and unless their worth is verified and validated through personal experience, their influence will be minimal. To really be effective, learning also has to be experiential. We must act upon ideas for them to be fully understood and eventually integrated. And they need to be reinforced so that new habits and orientations can be cultivated.

There are things in life that we simply must experience in order to know. Someone can tell you what it feels like to experience or witness the birth of your first child, but the actual experience is in another realm altogether. The same is true of love. You can read sonnets, hear romantic songs and understand the biochemistry, but until you experience love, it’s all just a bunch of words.

Stephen R. Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, put it this way: “To learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.”

Universal Skills

In research for Elevate, as I considered the essential wisdom that has been handed down to us for millennia, it became clear that some skills are so fundamental that they apply to virtually everything we care about and every aspect of our life that we wish to improve.

However, most how-to books teach task-specific skills. They prescribe specific actions aimed at achieving specific results: how to start a business, manage employees, play better golf, talk to teenagers, improve your marriage and so forth. But certain skills are so basic, so fundamental, so universally applicable that they drive achievement in every conceivable activity.

Does that sound far-fetched? Not if you realize that we’ve all grown up learning universal competencies and have depended on them all our lives. Remember the “three R’s”—reading, writing and ’rithmetic? There are very few areas of life where the ability to read and write and to add, subtract, multiply and divide, are not relevant. Communication skills are another example: Where would you be, at work, at home, or at play, without the ability to speak to and listen to other human beings?

Like tree branches, the disparate activities we engage in have similar roots, just as our most important endeavors share similar paths to success. In other words, we can accelerate growth, achievement and improvement by understanding and applying the principles that form the foundation for all achievement.

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