Video transcript below:

​What's up, ladies and gentlemen? Colin Stuckert here, founder and CEO of Wild Foods Co.

Another video today is about reading, learning, and doing. You have to balance the two. If you have too much of one or the other, you'll face problems. Let's get to it.

The Slight Edge and I am in chapter, page 180, chapter 12, Invest In Yourself. And so, we're going to talk about this idea we have right here, balancing learning and doing because most of us tend to go to the end of the spectrum that is more natural.

Some people like to close themselves off in a library and read, read, read. And that's awesome, and I aspire to do that. But what can happen if then you don't do it?

And then, when you don't do, you can't apply the knowledge and the things you've learned through the reading with actionable feedback from life. You're just going to be held behind; you're going to be lacking in some way.

On the vice-versa, if all you do is go out and do. You don't take the time to learn some of the good ideas and learn things that might be in your way like that might help with self-awareness and consciousness and psychology and sales, or other things, you might be repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again, and it might be holding you back.

And so today's video, we'll figure out how to balance the two, learning and to do, because they're both integral to a successful life.

And so on this one, page 178 of The Slight Edge. Pop quiz. Five frogs sit on a lily pad; one decides to jump off. How many are left? You're going to answer four because that's what I did, and that's what everybody does.

If you answered four, then your math skills are just fine. Unfortunately, it's not a math problem; it's a life problem. He says the answer is five because one of the frogs decided to jump off, but it didn't. Interesting.

Deciding to jump off is not the same as jumping off. Decided becomes jumped off when you jump off. That's some, like, whoa. My mind is blown.

Think about a second: there are many things we want to do in life, and there is a lot of stuff we even say we're going to do. But it is only a figment of your imagination once you do the thing.

Imagine books in my head, especially personal development books or self-help books. I just read all of them, right? I take all the courses.

Fundamentally, I want to own a business, or I want to be successful, or I want to make a lot of money, or whatever. But, until I go and do things, everything matters.

It brings me to a Confucius quote he's got in here. Knowledge, with practice, is practical, said Confucius, but then you add a second line. And practice, with expertise, is safe.

If you do, do, do, the danger is you get led into places that may not be useful or may not be calling you to where you want to go. And that's where the practice, the reading, the studying, and the other things come in to balance the equation.

It would help if you had a lot of studies and doing. And you do both of those, and that's how you raise on up.

He then talks about course correcting and uses the analogy of the rocket that got Neil Armstrong and Aldrin to the Moon.

He said that it was off-course almost 97% of the time. This means that for at least 97% of the time it took to get from Earth to the Moon, which is a quarter of a million miles, the vehicle was on track for only 7,500 miles.

Every half hour, the ship was in flight; it was on course for less than one minute. That means it's because as it was traveling to the Moon, the computer and the gyroscope had to correct, correct, correct, correct constantly.

When driving a car, you might think even a straight highway is perfectly straight, but it's not. If you were to actually, you know, lock your wheel in place and drive straight so that it was, you know, it was chained down to be perfectly straight; you'd eventually, very soon, end off the road because it's not a perfectly straight line. It's a constant curving, back and forth back and forth.

And that's why it looks like this when you're driving—curve, curve, curve. And so the analogy to life is that we're going towards this goal, and if you're not daily curving, to stay on the path.

It's a course correction daily. Then you're going to find yourself veering, veering, and then you do that for a long time, long enough, and you're way off course.

Imagine doing that on a highway, you know, you veered off an hour ago, you're veering off, even like a slight degree, but then you've been going for an hour, and you're like, a thousand miles in the wrong direction. It's such a great analogy.

It's really; it makes you think. To have that internal gyroscope, you have to have something; you've got to think of your goals and be reminded of your dreams.

I review my goals every morning; it's one of the things I do as part of my morning routine. And I'm always reading the big things I want to accomplish; I'm also reading the things I want to perform like, the next month, following three months, etcetera.

I do that to ensure my consciousness is paying attention to what's happening in front of me. And so that I can filter out the things I don't need to be doing that are just a distraction.

I wanted to know what this video would be about today, but we'll leave it at that. We're going to; you need to course correct in your life. And you also need to be balancing practice with theory and theory with doing right.

The more you can spend time learning, going out in the real world, and interacting with people, using quotes you read about.

You may be in a conversation, a business negotiation, or hiring someone. You notice they do or say these things, so something you read in a book about psychology pops up in your head, and you may change how you respond to that person or try a new tactic.

This is what the study does, but at the same time, once you're in the arena with actual people, you can only ever apply these concepts; it's just a figment of your imagination once you're doing the thing.

And so, I want you to get out and ensure you're doing the thing. Read, learn, study, but also do something.

My name's Colin Stuckert, and I approve of this message. Thank you for watching; drop some comments below, slap subscribe, jab a thumbs-up, and let me know if there's anything I can do to help you.

Let me know if there's anything you want me to record. Let me know if you want to talk about something; let's have a discussion; let's talk about some cool shit, okay.

So thanks for watching, guys, have a fricking fantastic day, and go and do something with this information.

Go and act, go and read, and do both of them. Make it a part of your daily life, and I promise you, you will get rewards for the effort.

​Colin Stuckert, 
Founder/CEO, Wild Foods