What Have We Done With What We Know?

On the night of April 15, 1912, the most advanced ship ever built at the time, sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic.

The official cause of death for most of the victims was not drowning, but cold shock response.

One thousand five hundred seventeen of the passengers who died that night were within a few meters away from a half-full lifeboat and disappeared beneath the sea before the Titanic did.

How could this happen?

Why did the crew on the ship who had received several warnings during the day not act?

Or, why did so many lifeboats go into the water half full?

The easy predictable response is neglect, a lack of training.

Arrogance, or pride.

We could also blame it on the hubris of an era that believed it had conquered nature.

Or, on the crew who panicked when they realized the unsinkable ship was sinking.

It's not that. Or rather, it's only the tip of the iceberg.

The real answer is much simpler and uncomfortable, something we all experience every day.

You are listening to Human Without Performance.

In the last two episodes I talked about change.

How when we say we want to change, we are often seeking relief.

Today, I want to deepen our exploration of change and examine why we rarely act on what we know and what all knowing is buying us.

Despite having access to all the necessary information to accomplish change we don’t change our behavior.

The difference between knowing what needs to be done and taking action to do it is as we will discover rarely about ignorance.

The Knowing Doing Gap

The idea behind the knowing doing gap, or acting against our better judgment can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and their concept of akrasia, or weakness of will.

It’s related to several modern psychological theories, which explains how we prioritize immediate rewards over long-term benefits.

I never liked the word “weakness of will.” It implies a lack of change is a character flaw, which its not.

I prefer motivational conflict since we are always motivated, even if it is to accomplish immediate gratification.

It also feels less moralizing and more inviting by revealing conflicts, between long-term intentions and short-term actions.

The nuance is that “doing nothing” often reflects competing motives, not a weakness of will.

A need for rest, a preference for comfort, a coast we are trying to avoid, passivity, or lack of a strong enough reason to act.

So, while I respect the Greeks, I think weakness of will falls short.

We often have conflicting motivations.

We want to change, or get something done, while also wanting things to stay as they are.

We’re not always driven by a clear, deliberate purpose. Our choices and inaction can be understood in terms of what feels most compelling in that moment.

The 11pm voice and the 7am voice are not two voices of one narrator.

They're two different states of a human experience, summoned under different conditions, with different inputs, producing different verdicts.

At 11pm, with the next episode queued and the cost eight hours away, We are in what the researchers call a visceral state. Tired but wired. At 7am, the cost is already paid and there's nothing left to negotiate.

Its not that we don’t learn from our mistakes.

We don’t learn, because the consequence are eight hours downstream from our decision.

The river of life doesn't keep what falls into it, it carries it.

The two never meet.

Each wasted minute isn’t a pause. It distance.

The choice gets no feedback, and, we file away the lesson without learning anything

Which reframes what pre-commitment is.

It isn't willpower. It isn't belief.

It's emotional time travel that imports the morning feeling into the evening moment.

A gentle reminder of the cost, what it would feel like to leave our phone in another room.

It reschedules the lesson so it can finally connect emotionally to the choice me make that causes it.

The mind isn't the enemy of the body. It's the lawyer for the what is most present.

At 11pm the body is restless and wants stimulation.

At 7am the body is depleted and wants rest.

Both are valid bodily signals.

The mind doesn’t care, it only argues for whichever one is conscious. That is why mindfulness works.

It isn't mind versus body.

It's immediate body versus delayed body, and the mind is the hired attorney for the one in the room.

We keep treating the self as a continuous narrator. It isn't.

The person who set the alarm is not the person who hears it.

Most of what we call weakness of will is one state being held accountable by another state that had no say in the decision. States like boredom, craving, revenge bedtime procrastination, to reclaim the hours we tell ourselves the day has stolen from us to justify our choices.

That's more compassionate and accurate perspective than the willpower story.

What Decides Which Facts Get To Matter?

In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy.

Four decades earlier Kodak had invented the digital camera and patented what at the time was called the "Electronic Still Camera.

Three decades before they filed for bankruptcy, their market intelligence chief ran a study that predicted the digital camera would replace film, handling Kodak roughly ten years to prepare.

Kodak did not only know the digital camera was coming, they invented it, owned the patent by law and had a clean head start, measured in decades, not hours.

Now you might be wondering, how do you go from being the inventor of the digital camera, having Insight knowledge and predictions about the digital market and still go bankrupt?

The gap between knowing and changing where most of us get stuck, isn't a shortcoming; it's a defense mechanism. A dysfunctional solution to quiet our anxiety, to keep our self-image intact and avoid a perceived loss.

For the past 25 years I have met thousands of patients that add a stark, almost tragic dimension to the knowing-doing gap.

Even when my patients understand their lifestyle habits will lead to a slow and agonizing death they don't change their habits.

My patients, you and I, none of us lack information, intelligence, or weakness of will.

The changes we know we should start doing get trapped between, two fundamentally different categories of knowledge that cognitive psychologists call: Declarative knowledge and Procedural knowledge. ¹

Declarative knowledge refers to the understanding of facts, concepts, and information we can consciously recall and articulate.

I understood for many years intellectually that my lifestyle was slowly killing me, without changing my behavior.

I lacked the procedural knowledge, the knowing how to perform specific tasks or a skill.

For many years I was stuck in declarative information without converting it into procedural knowledge because I skipped the practice.²

Declarative knowledge is the novice driver; how they think through every step, check mirrors every 20 seconds, need to focus on pressing the clutch and shifting gears.

Procedural knowledge is the experienced driver who performs the same sequence without any conscious effort, while singing along to a song played on the radio, or talking to a friend.

Adding to the complexity its not enough to be conscious about declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge and which one is at play.

There is often a collision between the logical mind and the survival instinct.

Knowing what would preserve our life doesn’t automatically make it emotionally possible to do.

Logic says "Stop drinking to live longer." But the survival instinct, when faced with unbearable existential dread, says "Numb the pain right now so we can make it to tomorrow."

In the tragic gap between knowing and doing, the person with a destructive behavior isn't choosing death over life; they are choosing the absence of psychological terror over the presence of an unbearable truth.

Declarative knowledge, the logical understanding that a behavior is harmful, primarily resides in the prefrontal cortex, which handles reasoning and long-term planning.

Survival instincts and emotional coping mechanisms, however, are rooted in the limbic system, which manages immediate threats and emotional regulation.

When we experiences existential dread or psychological terror, the limbic system perceives the experience as an acute survival threat.

In these moments, the brain prioritizes immediate relief over long-term health because the "survival" circuit is designed to solve the most urgent problem first. Not the most important.

The logical knowledge that drinking is destructive becomes a secondary concern compared to the primary goal of stopping an unbearable emotional state.

We are not operating from a place of logical choice, but from a place of emotional necessity.

Coping mechanisms are often procedural, meaning they have become a practiced, automatic response to pain bypassing the logical mind entirely.

Healing in any behavioral addiction does not require more declarative knowledge. It requires developing new procedural responses that allows us to navigate psychological terror without relying on destructive behaviors.

That doesn’t make the destructive behavior harmless, but it does change the question from “Why don’t I choose what I know?” to “What pain is this helping me escape, and what could make that pain bearable without the cost?”

Change begins not with more information or stronger willpower, but with enough safety, support, inspiration and alternative ways to get through the next hour.

The Price Of Admission

There is a price of admission that most of us miss:

Change is fundamentally driven by emotions rather than intellect.

It feels intellectual because we use cognition to interpret information, weigh our options, and plan changes in our minds.

We don’t change because deciding to change hurts, so that is were we need to start.

Look at the word itself. Decision. It comes from the Latin decidere.³

It literally means, to cut off.

A decision is not a selection. It is a severance.

We are not choosing one option; We are cutting off the possibility of a thousand other lives we could have lived.

That's why decisions feel like a loss, or grief.

Every real decision is a small death, and our nervous system knows it, before it reaches our mind.

To add to the complexity, the evolution of the thinking mind began with a feeling not a thought; the feeling system is millions of years older than the thinking mind.⁴

It's a time-ordering. The older decider votes first.

A door closed could mean a mate not won, a path not walked, a winter not prepared for.

Foreclosing was dangerous, so the body prices every cut at the old rate.

In a stable world, rigidity is the cheapest survival.

In a changing one, it is the most expensive.

Kodak was rigid not because they loved film, but because adapting felt too expensive. It was a survival reflex aimed at a world that no longer existed .

It's easy to see that Kodak's loyalty to film cost them so much, and why it felt like the right decision, not passivity, but we don’t fight to keep what isn’t dear to us.

The dictionary is passive about the word decision:

"A conclusion or resolution reached after consideration."

But a decision doesn't get reached. It gets made. It's the one moment in the process where we stop being the recipient of information, and start being the author of a cut.

Also, the cut only happens if we can pay the price and the price is not equal for everyone.

Sometimes the fear isn't a story we tell ourselves . It's an abusive relationship where there is real danger in real time.

To call that a mistake in judgment would be cruel and wrong. If the decision jeopardizes our safety, no theory can demand that price.

That said, most decisions in the western world, if we have a job that pay the bills, are about leaving a room, a conversation, a mindset, a version of a story that no longer serves us.

The first cut is often the tiniest, still it's one of the most important decisions we will ever make.

If we cannot sit with the discomfort, we will not make the cut, but reach for more knowledge to feel we are making progress.

The knowing-doing gap is not a failure of knowledge.

It is a failure to value the right kind of knowledge, the wordless, embodied kind that makes the cut.

We are obsessed with knowledge and illiterate in feeling.

The crew on the Titanic didn't lack information.

They had received warnings about icebergs all day from experienced captains on the sight.

They feared disappointing the owners, and anyone who believed the ship was unsinkable, because that made them look incompetent.

That was drove their decision, not valid information.

For Kodak the feeling of losing the revenue from film felt twice as intense as the possible gain in digital cameras, so they buried their own invention.⁵

They had already invested so much in film, how could they walk away now?⁶

That was what drove their decision, not valid information.

When something we hold dear is under threat we allow false information to drive our decisions, because it fills a gap in the story we are already living in.

We prefer a false complete story over an accurate, but incomplete one. That is why we will refuse information and aim our feelings at the wrong things.

So we can justify and protect our decisions.

The Socially Accepted Norms

From the moment we are born we are trained to control our feelings, instead of using them as information to lead ourselves.

"Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about." "

You're fine."

"Big boys don't cry."

"You are ugly when you are angry."

"Leave your feelings at the door."

Each line teaches the same lesson: the feeling is wrong, or an offense against the people watching.

We have been brainwashed into believing that feelings are wrong, that if we show feelings we will hurt the people we love and paradoxically, that is exactly what we end up doing.

When was the last time you stopped to ask:

"what is this feeling pointing at?"

The body answers what the voice refuses, since no one has taught us to get to know our feelings.

Growing up with an abusive father, all my fear, anger, and sadness got silenced or shamed; never read as information.

At the age of eight I had already learned internalized two options: control it, or aim it somewhere acceptable.

By the age of seventeen I had mastered the art of avoiding my feelings and emotions.

The crew on the Titanic weren't too emotional. They felt it wasn't acceptable to express what they really felt; that the ship would not stand a chance against the gigantic iceberg ahead of them, so the focused on looking competent.

They rerouted their feelings into the wrong goals, witch resulted in the sinking of the ship.

We all have an iceberg in our lives that we ignore.

In the way we work and live, believing that our beliefs differ from the majority, while we live in silent conformity.

We are at any point in time making a thousand small, but crucial decisions, whether we are aware of it or not.

The question is rarely "what do I need to learn?" But, "what am I afraid of losing?"

Change is not another thing to know. It's a feeling to examine and to cultivate. Built in reps by a thousand small emotional daily check-ins, felt fully, until the body knows which facts get to make the decisions.

The knowing doing gap doesn't close from the head down. It closes from the body up.

We don't need more warnings.

We need the courage to turn the ship, to sit with the agonizing slow friction of making hard decisions, until neuroplasticity has done its job and we have changed.

Knowing is Passive, Belief is Active

Kodak knew digital cameras was the future for 30 years.

The Titanic crew knew there was ice ahead.

In fact, they knew it so many hours in advance that they could have evacuated every single passenger, not by lifeboats but by ships.

But like we already covered knowing is factual information sitting in the prefrontal cortex. It requires immense energy and willpower to act on knowing.

Willpower is a guard we pay every hour.

Eventually, the guard falls asleep, the brain seeks to conserve energy, and we default to old habits.

Doing-as-Usual Versus Doing-Differently

Change by itself is not necessarily wise: it will as we all experienced be impulsive, performative, or aimed at the wrong goal.

You only need to look at politics, religion, and corporate policies to understand that analysis and debate often become substitutes for taking action.

Fear and destructive internal competition can make it harder to put what we know to work.

Constructive change combines good judgment, a worthwhile purpose, and follow-through, crucial steps we often ignore.

It’s not change for its own sake, or action at any cost, but choosing an appropriate next step, taking it, learning from what happens, and adjusting my behavior so not to sink the ship.

Change starts with accepting that we are always doing something, and questioning it.

Kodak acted. The Titanic crew acted, but only on what they had decided they already knew to be true.

The real gap isn't knowing versus doing, it's doing-as-usual versus doing-differently.

In our ability to rearrange our thinking and adapt our behavior to changing demands, rather than remaining locked into one single course of action. ⁷

It is the precursor to learning to identify and challenge irrational or dysfunctional thoughts, such as all-or-nothing thinking, magical thinking, over generalization, magnification, and emotional reasoning, all associated with poor decision-making.

When an outgrown belief begins to dissolve or when we are fighting to bridge the gap between theoretical knowing and practical doing, our reference point for assessing changes in behavior gets disrupted.

That feels heavy and unsettling because our belief system is shedding a default behavior before the new feels natural. It isn't always a sign that something is wrong; sometimes it is the necessary heat generated by stepping outside our comfort zone.

Understanding our own and others internal baseline is crucial as it provides insights into how we typically function and helps us track changes over time.

When we unpack our days, weeks, months and years we can look for where energy is leaked to boundary violations, unfulfilled needs, or simply a shallow engagement with life.

Formative change, the type that changes the way we lead ourselves through life, is the byproduct of knowing what matters, discerning what each moment calls for, and having the courage to learn and act, even when it feels uncomfortable.

The Coordinates

For a very long time I believed the dominant self-improvement story about replacement that the self-help industry and hustle culture are selling:

"I am flawed, and I must become a different, 'better' version of myself," treating myself as a problem to be solved through force.

It's a model of rupture, not healing.

What I am suggesting is a gentler alternative: change as finding the resonance between who you already are and how you want to lead yourself in life.

Throughout my teen years and as a young adult I never stopped to ask what kind of man I wanted to bring into my relationships.

I woke up, got triggered, reacted without any compassion for myself or others throughout the day went to sleep. Woke up and did it all over again.

I have a lot of things I am not proud of in retrospect, some which I am still trying to make amends for.

Asking what kind of man I want to bring into what I call my life has given me the courage to hear the feedback I had been ignoring.

Change stopped being a choice I have to make and started being about seeing the thing I need to stop protecting.

I want to leave you with one question that has the potential to change your life, if you answer it thoughtfully:

"What are you afraid of losing, and what becomes possible when you stop protecting it?"

You have been listening to Human Without Performance.

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I'll see you in the next one.