Knowing isn’t half the battle

There’s this little aphorism that I’ve heard floating around: “knowing is half the battle.”¹

I don’t think it is.

When it comes to self-improvement, I think it’s assumed that knowing is at least 50 percent of the battle. Perhaps more. What else are the books for? They’re to fill you up with knowing and then all you have to do is some (often somewhat unspecified) battling to sort your life out.

These days I wonder if this is even slightly true. Knowing seems a maximum of ten percent of the battle, perhaps much less. For instance, I don’t think my life would be much worse if I had never heard the phrase “executive dysfunction.” Sure, it gives me a term, a shorthand, for “why the flipping heck am I not doing the gosh-darn thing that I cannot stop thinking about”² but that’s just a slightly more efficient form of frustration.

I wonder if this is the source of my combined bugbear with relatability, the prevalence of memes, and therapy-speak in the ADHD community. Yes, thank you, billionth executive dysfunction explainer video in my timeline, but does this really help? I run into the same issue with political awareness content: is it actually useful to know that the world is all flipped up, without explicit instructions following on how to unflip it?

For irony’s sake, here is the exact kind of video I am complaining about. I found it very annoyingly relatable.

I am kind of done with new names for old frustrations. I know what procrastination feels like; I can summon that flop-sweat sensation at will. What I need to learn is what it feels like to shift out of that mode, to understand what specific switches got flipped, to map the terrain as I go so I can backtrack and do it again next time I am caught in a spiral.

We all know what flailing feels like; doomscrolling, Netflix surfing, snacking, whatever form avoidance takes. We need to find a way to remember, to embody, doing the stuff we want or need to be doing.

I am not sure if this is making sense so I’ll change tack. I like to interrogate the aphorisms I write about so I searched for “knowing is half the battle,” expecting some kind of lineage from “knowledge is power” (France is Bacon) or something like the Art of War or Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

It’s from GI Joe.

“Now you know, and knowing is half the battle” is the catchphrase from the little safety PSAs that followed GI Joe cartoons.

The more you know.

Possibly everyone knew this except me. I wasn’t allowed to watch GI Joe as a kid – either for demonic or financial reasons, I’m not sure which – so I don’t know where I picked it up from. Pop culture osmosis, maybe?

Anyway, that reminded me of the Fenslerfilm GI Joe PSAs, which were doubly funny to me when I watched them because I had never seen the originals, and I was stoned out of my gourd. University!

The remixed PSAs are 24 years old now. We’re flipping old, you guys! So old! And our rest homes are going to be so weird. They’ll be playing these things to dementia patients and watching their eyes light up like it’s Mozart.

I had intended this to be a shorter post followed by a digest of some of the stuff I wrote about last week, but I’ve gone long. Here’s the stuff anyway! Four articles for the price of one! (My writing is free.)

Hip hip hooray, the world didn’t end today

The Third Way

Most people are good sorts

Also! Here’s a link to that podcast I make with Emily. People have been getting in touch to tell me it’s good, which is probably a good sign?

Thanks, as always, for reading. And listening too these days, I suppose.

Now, comment! I want to know if you knew about the GI Joe thing or if it just percolated its way into pop culture and we’re all going round quoting a cartoon designed to sell plastic dolls to boys like it’s some deep profundity.

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1. What should a new aphorism be called? A neoaphorism? We must continue the research. ↩︎
2. Sometimes bits of my brain that had deep grooves carved by my evangelical upbringing switch back on unexpectedly and I find myself using swear-word substitutes. I have decided just to roll with it. ↩︎