The Knowing and Doing Paradox

Here’s an age-old problem. Sometimes knowing about something isn't enough, because we also have to do something and take action. This is what I call the knowing and doing paradox.

In 32 years of medical practice, I’ve sat opposite tens of thousands of people, and almost none of them were confused about what needed to happen. They could tell me in one sentence. Move more. Drink less. Leave the job. Have the conversation. Start the thing they’d been talking about for three years. They knew, and they’d known for a long time.

And they still weren’t doing it.

That’s the paradox, and it isn’t a gap in information. You’ve read the articles. You’ve watched the videos. You could probably teach the material by now. So if more knowing were the answer, you’d have arrived years ago.

When it comes to our courses, just like learning anything new, you can’t just know; you have to do as well and put that knowledge into practice.

If you want to change, you also need to change the way you think, so that your old mental habits don't get in the way of what you need to do.

Why doing is so much you ask harder than the knowing

Everyone could benefit from some improvement in how they think, but any behaviour change will also take effort on your part. There will be times when change happens as soon as we first become aware of a problem, but more often than not, it takes time, because something needs to change internally.

The reason effort alone isn’t enough is that something is quietly working against you, and it isn’t laziness. It’s your own thinking.

Cognitive biases are systematic errors in the way the mind reasons. Not moods, not excuses, not weakness of character. But faults in the logic circuits in our brains, which we all have to some degree, produce poor ways of thinking, delayed or poor decisions repeatedly.

Here’s the crucial part. A cognitive bias never feels like a bias. It feels like the sensible thing to do. When you act (or don’t act in this scenario), you do so because of how your mind has handled the situation, applied its own logic, and applied learned mental shortcuts learned during past events. As we've said before, the mind is open to thinking errors called cognitive biases. They are the reason you don't see common sense, why you make quite obvious mistakes repeatedly, why you often stay stuck in your problems, and, in the context of this article, why you don't do what you know you need to do.

A single cognitive bias can scupper you; yet a handful of them put your life on hold.

Knowing what’s wrong isn’t the same as fixing it

This is the bit most self-help misses. If you take out a faulty way of thinking and put nothing in its place, the gap doesn’t stay empty. The old pattern moves straight back in, because it’s familiar and it’s the only thing you’ve got. It’s why insight on its own changes so little, and why people can understand exactly what they’re doing wrong and carry on doing it for years.

Something has to replace it. In our courses, we call these success heuristics.

A heuristic is just a mental shortcut, a mental rule of thumb; a success heuristic is what your mind reaches for without stopping, without having to deliberate, in a difficult situation that can lead to a successful outcome. Success heuristics lead to better decisions, better ways of acting, and reliably produce better outcomes.

The problem is, we may know what to do, but few of us do what needs to be done. To help you follow through and to build that motivation for change, our courses also have exercises to help you create a mindset that helps you question the common cognitive biases that can get in the way and helps you build better ways of thinking so that you can get your life unstuck.

How our courses handle it

Our courses are structured to take you on a journey through this change process, using real-life examples from people who have gotten stuck at that point in their journey too. It’ll pick you up where you’re stuck, it’ll help you to improve your thinking, and hopefully it’ll help you replace some of the bad mental habits and poor thinking patterns that have sunk you in the past.

Every lesson does one of two things. It identifies a specific thinking error that’s keeping you stuck and shows you how to correct it, or it gives you a better way of thinking to put it in its place. By removing what’s working against you, and by helping you build thinking patterns that will move you forward lesson by lesson. Every lesson also comes with a reflection exercise, because reading is knowing and the exercise is doing, and that's what makes the new mental patterns stick.

Reading a book on CBT isn't the same as having CBT; reading about mindfulness isn't the same as daily meditation practice, and reading about riding a bike doesn't mean you can ride a bike. Only the combination of knowing and doing is the key to lasting change.

For some people, all they need is to identify a few cognitive errors in their thinking. For others, it takes a bit more work and effort. Yet little changes make big differences. A tiny change in direction can have a huge effect on your final destination, and one small decision can change your life.

Where to start

Start with the free lessons. There are seven of them, no payment and no commitment. They cover the basics, you get a feel for what we do, why you might be stuck, what it’s costing you, and why most approaches to self-development don’t work.

If you want the rest, it’s all in one place. All 8 courses, 268 lessons with reflection exercises on downloadable PDFs for nearly every single lesson, for $5.99 a month. No tiers, no upsells, nothing held back for a higher price. See it as a five-minute therapy session every day to help you correct your thinking, for less than the price of a cup of coffee every month. 

The price is deliberate. I don't want cost to be a hurdle. I want to reach as many people as I can, and I want you to be the best you can be. 

I want you to use our courses to look a little deeper at what’s beneath the surface of the decisions you make in life, to find the mental bits and pieces you may not even know were missing and to get your life unstuck.

But remember this: there’s no point just knowing what to do; you have to do something about it too.

Free Introductory Course or Join Juvenate Complete for $5.99 a month

Common questions

What is the knowing and doing paradox?

It’s the gap between understanding what you need to change and actually doing it. Most people who are stuck aren’t confused about what needs to happen. They’ve known for a long time. Knowing turns out to be the easy half.

Why doesn’t knowing what to do lead to doing it?

Because cognitive biases get in the way. These are systematic errors in your automatic thinking that supply convincing reasons not to act, and they feel like sound judgment rather than distortion. Until you can identify the specific bias holding you in place, you’ll accept its reasoning every time.

What is a success heuristic?

A heuristic is a mental shortcut, a rule your mind applies without deliberating. Success heuristics are the deliberately better ones: rules that reliably produce good outcomes, which people who navigate life well often use without ever having named them. They’re what you put in place of a bias once you’ve removed it.