…is that it brings incremental results.

If you want incremental results, then embrace incremental change.  The problem is that most of us don’t want incremental results.  We dream of significant results.  Even radically different results.

Here’s what’s true:

Incremental change brings incremental results.

Radical change ushers in the potential for radical results.

Where you get yourself in trouble is when you start believing that incremental change will produce radical results.  Leaders can easily get to the point where they sincerely believe that small changes will produce big results, even though that’s almost never the case.

Why do leaders talk themselves into believing that incremental change will produce the results they are looking for?  There are at least three reasons:

1. Fear of people’s reaction to significant change. We know what happens to pioneers.
2. Past opposition to change. Once bitten, twice shy.
3. Belief that progress should come without pain. Very little significant is ever accomplished without significant struggle.

If you want significantly different results, push past the fear and stop thinking incrementally.

This isn’t a post about physical fitness (although I could write one…and the audience would include myself). It’s a post about what we do with knowledge.

I know a lot of Christians who are 5,000 bible verses overweight. And I know more than a few Christian leaders who are several hundred podcasts, blog posts and books overweight. We’ve consumed far more than we’ve applied.

Somewhere along the way we developed a line of thinking that said maturity = knowledge. A mature Christian is a someone who knows a lot about the bible. A mature leader is someone who knows a lot about life, faith and leadership. Makes sense, right?

Maybe not.

While knowledge at some level is essential, we live in an information age.  Most of us have access to far more information than we can digest. Podcasts, blogs, books, social media conversations, articles and more have filled our brains with significantly more knowledge than we can process, let alone apply.

What if the real test for maturity wasn’t the possession of knowledge, but the right application of it?  What if maturity = application?

The problem, most of the time, isn’t that we don’t know enough, it’s that we don’t do enough with what we know.

Maybe knowledge is like food in some respects. We need a daily intake, but unless we work it off by applying it, we misuse it. Perhaps a better question that “what did I learn today?” is “what did I do with what I learned today?”

I think the world might be different if we stopped living in information overload and started to work toward application overload. I know my world would be different.

What do you think keeps you from applying what you know? What helps you apply it?