Knowing something that other people do not is a powerful tool to have. Gaining the wisdom how to live your life in the best, the most peaceful, the most satisfactory and the most fulfilling way is an unprecedented resource that will benefit your life as you grow older.
Let’s think for a while about the time when you were younger. As a child, you most likely were not able to predict that staying outdoors for hours without a warm jacket will result in catching cold (unless you do it regularly to strengthen your body step by step). As a teenager, you perhaps did not have enough medical knowledge to figure out that drinking alcohol with your classmates will increase a possibility of being addicted to alcohol (only less than 10% of people in the U.S. who do not start drinking until they are 21-years-old will be addicted). As a freshman in college, you probably did not realize that many professors tried to impose a certain way of thinking, ideology, on you (it is almost always either being liberal or conservative).
Knowing is power as it gives you the tremendous advantage over others because you have already known all the details of a certain situation either by learning from your own mistakes and trophies, or other people’s successes and failures. You have known the causes of why something happens. You have realized in which direction different life situations will develop over time – all single steps are already in your head, and that is great. And finally, you have been able to predict the results; find out that consequences for you and other people involved will be either negative, neutral and positive.
Nowadays, you have the advantage over your ancestors because you can gain valuable knowledge from many sources including the Internet websites. For example, by reading books, watching documentary movies (only if they show different perspectives), having conversation with a person older than you, reading intelligent blogs while skipping those not worth reading, or aligning with positive people.
But above all this, the most important reason for gaining knowledge is to be able to distinguish good from bad, so we can meaningfully live our lives by doing only the right thing.
It is difficult because the world is full of people who agree to do bad things, very often without even considering negative consequences for others, e.g. shark loans encouraging financially weak people to take a loan, or only-for-high-profit companies promoting low-quality products which break down after a few weeks.
The way I try to get powerful knowledge is by extracting good things from anything that surrounds me in order to collect positive stuff in my memory and write everything down on this blog. I use both my previous experiences, as well as I look at each situation with morality in mind.
Morality is all about intentions, decisions and actions that are distinguished as proper and improper; disjunction between right and wrong; derived from a code of conduct that is universal. Morality is synonymous with ‘goodness’ or ‘rightness’. You can check the definition of morality according to Stanford University.
If my inner voice tells me that something should not be happening, e.g. housing prices should not be rising to the levels when majority of the people cannot afford the average-size house without becoming bank slaves for years.
And, if I am able to combine this gut impulse with my real-life knowledge, then I stop for a while, pause, and enjoy the feeling because it is when my knowledge becomes powerful.
