THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KNOWING SOMETHING AND UNDERSTANDING IT
// We live in a world absolutely drowning in information.
Reports. Dashboards. Podcasts. Books. Articles. Data. Research. TikToks. LinkedIn posts. Customer feedback. Sales numbers. Market movements. Brand trackers. White papers. AI summaries.
Someone somewhere has probably already measured, analysed, explained, visualised or made a fucking carousel about whatever it is you are trying to understand. And yet, despite having access to more information than any generation before us, I still don’t believe that we necessarily understand the world any better. Maybe we know more things. But knowing something and understanding it are not the same thing.
// It’s something that I preach about at work, and even in life…
Learned experience and lived experience.
Learned experience is what somebody, something or some source can teach you. You read it. Study it. Analyse it. Ask questions about it. You learn how something supposedly works.
Lived experience is different. It is what you absorb by being close enough to something for long enough that you start noticing the things nobody bothered putting in the textbook. The contradictions. The rituals. The weird little behaviours. The invisible rules. The things people say they do versus what they actually do. The things that make absolutely no sense from the outside but perfect sense once you’ve spent time inside.
Information tells you what something looks like. Proximity starts telling you what it feels like. Neither is inherently better. We need both. But I think we’ve become obsessed with the first and occasionally forgotten the second.
YOU CAN STUDY WEALTH. OR YOU CAN BE AROUND IT.
// One of my favourite examples is wealth. I grew up around wealth, but none of it was mine. 💀💀💀
And I think that distinction gave me an interesting vantage point because I was close enough to observe it without necessarily belonging to it. You can learn about affluent consumers through household income, net worth, postcode, spending behaviour, luxury purchases, travel habits, investment profiles and whatever segmentation somebody has developed to put rich people into six conveniently pretty coloured boxes. All useful.
// But from inside that world, wealth starts looking different.
You notice that the loudest symbols of money aren’t necessarily the ones that matter most. You notice that someone might spend an obscene amount on a piece of art and argue over a $9.99 delivery charge. You notice language, habits, manners, access, confidence, expectations and tiny assumptions about how the world works.
None of that means every wealthy person behaves identically. Of course they don’t. That would be fucking ridonkulous. But proximity exposes nuances that are incredibly difficult to see when you are standing outside looking through the window.
// The closer you get to a world, the less stereotypical it usually becomes.
And I think that applies to almost every group of people we attempt to understand. Parents. Teachers. Tradies. Doctors. Migrants. Teenagers. Farmers. Founders. Nurses. Gamers. Retirees. People living with disabilities. People experiencing poverty. People who collect Pokémon cards. People who fucking love caravans.
There is always an inner world, not necessarily some exclusive club, but a shared collection of behaviours, assumptions, frustrations, jokes, language and meaning that becomes much easier to see when you spend time close to it.
YOU DON’T GO TO THE ZOO TO UNDERSTAND A LION. YOU GO TO THE MOTHERFUCKING JUNGLE
This is probably where my strategist brain creeps in, because throughout my career I’ve been expected to understand a lot about a lot of different people very quickly. One week you might be learning about power tools, the next infant nutrition, cancer research, beef, fashion, insurance, telecommunications, restaurants or superannuation. You become a walking junk drawer of references. Research findings. Sales reports. Consumer behaviour. Cultural trends. Category conventions. Product specifications. Customer journeys.
// Random shit you read fifteen years ago that suddenly becomes relevant in a meeting on Tuesday morning.
And yes, you learn…. But at some point you also have to leave the fucking building.
If you want to understand how people shop, go shopping. If you want to understand a restaurant, sit in it. If you want to understand parents, spend time around parents when everyone is tired, dinner is late and the toddler has decided trousers are an infringement of their civil liberties.
// Because behaviour changes with context.
A person answering questions in a focus group is not necessarily the same person standing in Coles at 6:45pm trying to decide what the fuck to cook for dinner.
// You don’t go to the zoo to understand what it means to be a lion in the wild. You go to the jungle.
The environment matters. Pressure matters. Time matters. Other people matter. Money matters. Mood matters. Culture matters. The reason somebody behaves a certain way often only becomes apparent when you see the circumstances surrounding the behaviour.
BUT SIMPLY BEING THERE DOESN’T MEAN YOU UNDERSTOOD IT
// There is a trap on the other side of this argument too.
Lived experience can sound wonderfully profound until somebody says, “Well, I went there once and this is what people are like.”
Hell No!
Being somewhere does not automatically mean you understood it.
Two people can travel to exactly the same country and experience almost entirely different worlds. One person can go to Italy and become fascinated by architecture, religion, family, history, food, migration, regional identity, class, politics, design and how centuries of history are still visible in everyday behaviour. Another person can go to Lake Como, recreate twelve Instagram photos, eat at whatever restaurant TikTok told them to visit and fly home.
Neither person necessarily had the “wrong” holiday. People travel for different reasons. But they were paying attention to different things.
// Lived experience without curiosity is just something that happened to you.
That, for me, is the important bit.
You can live somewhere for twenty years and remain incredibly incurious about it. You can work beside someone for a decade and never really understand their experience. You can travel the world and somehow encounter almost nothing that challenges the world you already knew.
Experience only becomes useful when you notice.
// When you ask why.
When something doesn’t make sense and instead of dismissing it as weird, you become interested in why it makes perfect sense to somebody else.
CURIOSITY IS THE CONVERTER
Maybe the real distinction isn’t actually learned versus lived.
Maybe it is learned + lived + curiosity. Learned experience gives you information. Lived experience gives you proximity. Curiosity turns both into understanding.
// Knowledge accumulates. Curiosity connects.
This is why some incredibly educated people can still have surprisingly narrow views of the world, while someone without a wall full of qualifications can occasionally see something everyone else missed. Education gives us tools. Experience gives us reference points. Curiosity determines what we do with them.
It is also why I’ve never completely bought into the idea that expertise means having all the answers.
Quite often the most interesting people I meet know enough to realise how much they don’t know. They ask better questions. They are comfortable saying, “I don’t understand this yet.” They notice contradictions instead of trying to eliminate them.
And contradictions are where the interesting shit usually lives. People want convenience but resent automation. People want personalised experiences but worry about privacy. People say they want more choice and then become paralysed when offered too much of it.
// Human beings are wonderfully fucking inconsistent.
Understanding those inconsistencies requires more than information. You need context.
GET OUT OF YOUR OWN FUCKING WORLD
// There is another part of lived experience I think matters enormously i.e. deliberately spending time outside your own world.
Most of us live inside relatively predictable bubbles. We work with people with similar jobs. Read similar things. Follow similar accounts. Live around people with reasonably similar socioeconomic circumstances. Have dinner with people whose worldview doesn’t usually violently collide with our own. Algorithms make this even easier because they constantly hand us evidence that the world looks remarkably similar to whatever we already believed it looked like.
// Then we confuse familiarity with reality.
But there are thousands of completely different versions of normal happening around us simultaneously. Normal for a single parent working two jobs is different from normal for a tech founder. Normal for an eighty-year-old living alone is different from normal for a twenty-two-year-old living with six mates.
// Your normal is not normal. It is simply the version of the world you happen to know best. And that’s exactly why wandering matters.
MAYBE WE’VE STOPPED WANDERING
There’s a wordplay I keep coming back to…
Wonder. Wander.
// The world is still full of wonder, but I think we’ve stopped wandering through it.
We sit at desks wondering why people behave the way they do while the actual people are outside the window. We commission another report. Build another dashboard. Ask another AI tool. Run another survey. Add another data source. Make another bloody persona.
And sometimes all of that is necessary. But sometimes the thing we’re missing cannot be downloaded. You have to go somewhere. See something.
// Some of the most interesting truths in the world are hiding inside things everyone stopped noticing.
THE MAP IS STILL USEFUL
None of this is an argument against research, education, expertise, data or learning.
Quite the opposite. The map matters.
A map can stop you wandering in circles. It shows you where others have been. It condenses generations of knowledge into something you can use. It gives language to things you might otherwise struggle to describe.
// But nobody confuses reading a map of Tokyo with having walked through Tokyo.
Nobody reads a recipe and claims they have tasted the meal.
Nobody looks at a weather report and believes they have felt the rain.
// A representation of reality is still not reality.
And maybe that’s the distinction I’ve been trying to get across.
Learned experience gives us representations. Lived experience gives us encounters.
// Curiosity helps us connect the two.
PEOPLE ARE LOST BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT WANDERING
I have no desire to become a walking encyclopedia. It sounds fucking exhausting, and awfully heavy. I’d much rather become a better collector of experiences, observations, conversations, contradictions and questions.
But sometimes you have to get close enough to the world itself to understand:
Why the fuck did that make perfect sense to them?
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PS: Clarity is easy to talk about and surprisingly difficult to create. If your team is currently navigating complexity, competing priorities or strategic drift, I’d be happy to have a chat.
💀🖤
Cheers,
DANIEL JACOBS
http://bjornfox.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denialjacobs/
Melbourne, Australia
THE CREATIVE STRATEGIST 