“Stop learning. Start applying”, wow, lovely article. I so want to apply the advice to apply. But i didn’t learn how to apply. In all seriousness, i do not know how to apply what i learn.

Currently life is all focused on knowing, knowing from learning. I am a receptacle of information from dawn till dusk. I am so busy taking information in that i cant get any time to put some action out.

How? Well, Alanis said it best:

You live, you learn.

I am working. I am writing. I am exercising. I am creating. I am loving. I am organizing. I am planning. I am growing. I am living. I do all these things, but none of them seem to be like really applying what I learn. They are simply more learning.

At work I learn everyday what works and what doesn’t. While writing i learn constantly what gets read and what doesn’t. Exercising, I learn everyday how much i can commit physically. You live you learn. It is not, you live you apply.

I came to believe that in order to apply you need a Timeout!

In sports, a time-out is a halt in the play. This allows the coaches of either team to communicate with the team, e.g., to determine strategy or inspire morale, as well as to stop the game clock., Wikipedia

If you want to apply, you must first stop. Stop. Stop learning. Stop working, stop planning, stop loving, stop living, stop growing.

OMFG! What do you mean stop loving? Or, stop living, are you nuts??

Yes. I mean just stop moving forward like a full speed formula one car and get a pit stop. Looking in history, all great achievements follow some route change, some grand reassessment, some life changing break, while today you have sabbaticals, career changes you name it.

Only if you stop generally will learning stop. That is how we’re evolved because the environment was a constant source of novelty and we had to constantly learn about it.

Yet all that we call civilization was created by applying. Applied religion, applied strategy, applied philosophy, applied politics. Yet it all involved stagnation as a means of random timeouts in humanity’s evolution.

I don’t know if it is a good advice

I am not able to eat my own dog food currently. So it might be bad advice. In reality stopping is very, very costly. We are a society focused on growth and that trickles down to each member of the society: we must keep the wheel spinning for our life to not descend into utter chaos.

Were you able to stop?