Mao Zedong
On Practice
Knowing arrives through doing
On Practice (1937)
You understood the idea and nothing changed. This one asks where knowledge comes from, and answers: from carrying something out.
What actually happened?
Written at Yan'an the same year as On Contradiction. Two failures were common in the ranks: one man memorised manuals and treated conclusions drawn on somebody else's battlefield as his own knowledge; another charged on instinct alone. The essay refuses both. Real knowledge comes out of doing, then has to be checked against what happened, then done again. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. Memorising without that loop is what he called book worship.
Knowledge comes out of doing
Following an argument is not the same as being able to run it. A judgement that has never been struck back at by events is a sentence nobody has paid for yet. What survives hardens after you have taken something out into the world.
Many people can describe the product well. Few have closed the first paying customer. The first group is still outside the knowledge; the second is inside it.
Doing once is not the loop
One pass is not enough. Do without looking back and all you keep is fatigue. Look without going again and all you keep is an impression. Knowledge is a circle: act, review, act again, and the review has to be able to change the next act.
A team running the same playbook for three quarters with flat numbers, adding hours rather than reading them, has stopped at the doing.
A book hands you the result, not the circuit
What somebody wrote down is the product of a loop they finished. You get the conclusion; the trials, corrections and second attempts are not on the page. So reading can shorten your route and cannot walk it for you.
Twenty books of method and still no plan anyone can execute is normal. That is twenty circuits other people walked, and none of them yours.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: a shelf of method and not one live situation of your own.
Ask first: which already-finished thing has this sentence been through?
Where it goes wrong: you can explain more and more and deliver less and less; somebody else's review gets filed as your own experience.
Lines to keep
If you want to know the taste of a pear, eat it.
Practice is the criterion of truth.
What is merely perceived cannot at once be understood.
Same situation, other people are asking
I read a lot and can't recall any of it when it matters.I've done the reps and it still isn't automatic.What I learned only works in the shape I learned it.I take in everything and keep nothing. What should I be leaving out?Nothing I study stays · all 9 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.