Learning or Information Hoarding?

These days you have to be a never-ending learner in order to be successful in life. If you are like me, you don’t really mind. You may want to learn a language to be able to talk with people you otherwise couldn’t. You may be interested in learning how to bake so that later on you can open your own café. Or you may love to learn all there is about wine, just for fun. The great thing is that all the information you could ever want is right there, ready for you to use it, whether on the Internet, in libraries, or in school.

But that availability of information may also work against you and you may become an “information hoarder” without even realizing it. Here are the signs:

• You tell yourself you have to learn from others’ experience. You know what you want to do, but you constantly feel the urge to look at how others have done it, because you don’t want to make a mistake.
• You tell yourself you have to become an expert, so you collect all the information you can find and you study it, analyze it, debate it with others, all while thinking how much more there is still to learn before you are ready to use your knowledge.
• You tell yourself you have to learn about yourself and get mentally ready for whatever it is that you want to do. So, you read a lot about human behavior and you analyze why you are the way you are.

The tipping point between learning and information hoarding is when learning stops helping you take action and when it actually makes you avoid taking the next step. Your time gets consumed by collecting information, which gives you a great excuse: “I couldn’t do it, I was too busy learning!”

The cure is pretty simple. First, you have to recognize the issue. Ask yourself: “Why am I learning this? What am I going to do after I’m done learning this? And when will I be actually done?” When you recognize your habit of getting into collection mode whenever you are scared of taking an action, be gentle to yourself and start taking tiny actions that are not difficult at all. Getting something done, however small, will motivate you to take on more action. And then, if you realize you have to learn something before you can take the next step, it’ll be driven by a specific need.