PART III               GETTING USEFUL 
IDEAS AND KNOWLEDGE

     How do you fix a flat tire on a bicycle?  Why does the rider 
stay upright on the moving bicycle, rather than immediately 
falling to one side or the other?  And, how can you make a 
bicycle much easier to pump? 
     The subject of Part III is increasing your stock of existing 
knowledge and new ideas.  There is considerable overlap between 
them.  Someone else's idea becomes your knowledge when you learn 
of it.  And you may think up an idea all by yourself but years 
after it is common knowledge.  Yet it is often useful to 
distinguish between ideas and knowledge. 
     You need knowledge and ideas to help you operate the 
machinery of your life and your business more efficiently.  You 
also need ideas about new alternatives for your personal or 
professional life as the raw material for cost-benefit 
evaluation.  And you also must know how to eliminate from 
consideration ideas that are unpromising, so as not to waste 
valuable time making unnecessary analyses.  Chapter 3-1 discusses 
how to create and how to eliminate ideas. 
     Knowledge can usefully be categorized as a) tacit -- such as 
knowing how to ride a bicycle, b) applied -- such as knowing how 
to fix a bicycle, and c) abstract -- such as understanding why 
the rider and bicycle don't fall down. 
     The relative importance of these kinds of knowledge is 
subject to argument.  Surprising to me, some writers1 say that tacit knowledge 
bulks larger than other knowledge.  I cannot think of a way to measure the relative importance of tacit and other types of 
knowledge, however. 
     Neither you nor I nor anyone else can contain in one head more than an infinitesimal part of the knowledge possessed by all 
five billion of us on earth.  If you lack information of a particular sort, then, it is quite possible that someone else has that 
knowledge, and there is some chance that you can manage to transfer that knowledge into your own store of knowledge.  What 
Soichiro Honda (of motorcycle and auto fame) says about ideas is equally true of knowledge:  "Where l00 people think, there are 
l00 powers; if l,000 people think, there are l,000 powers."  One implication is that when you are in doubt about something, it 
makes sense to talk it over informally with some of the people you happen to meet casually in the locker room, on the job, 
wherever.  Someone is just likely to know what you need to know but don't know.  
     Before we rush on to more "sophisticated" methods of getting ideas and knowledge, I wish to emphasize and re-emphasize and 
emphasize again that every knowledge-getting venture should begin with a slow and wide-ranging look at the actual raw material or 
circumstances in which you are interested.  It is certainly true that our perceptions are conditioned by the innumerable 
categories -- call them theories, if you wish -- that already exist in our minds, some of which may even be present at birth.  But 
these categories do not wholly constrain us from seeing new things in new ways, and then developing new categories.  The only way 
to break out of the old categories is to saturate yourself in the raw experience which you wish to work with and learn about. 
     Let's be specific, as befits the point I am trying to make here.  If you want to know how to keep the beach umbrella on your 
porch from being blown over in the wind, look at how other people protect their umbrellas; look at other items that are protected 
from being blown over; sit down and look at your umbrella and its immediate surroundings; and so on.  Perhaps let the problem sit 
for days and weeks as you give yourself a chance to reflect on it again and again.  Do not simply ask an "expert" at the office 
for a solution, or just look it up at the library, though you certainly should do those things, too, if you do not come up with an 
adequate solution.  Or, if you want to understand race relations in the U. S. and you are white, you might live with a black 
family for a while, or even darken your skin as John Griffin did, and then live as a black for a spell.  Only this kind of first-
hand experience can save you from the incredible blunders that "theorists" too often make when they draw their ideas solely from 
the body of abstract knowledge.  
     Keep in mind the old yarn about the Greeks who were debating the number of teeth in a horse's mouth, using all manner of 
assumptions and deduction.  One of their number eventually suggested that they look at a horse's mouth.  The fabled response is 
too often what happens in highly-educated circles:  The others shunned him on the grounds that he was a crude intellectual boor.
     There is no mystery about how you gain tacit knowledge:  You practice, learning from both errors or successes, whether the 
knowledge is riding a bicycle or learning the proper manners in a new culture.  Book knowledge of the principles may help.  A 
skilled practitioner can often speed your learning.  But practice is essential.  No one can learn to swim without getting into the 
water.  That's about all that can be said at a general level about acquiring tacit knowledge, and therefore we shall simply leave 
it at that. 
     Developing applied knowledge also needs practice, and practical teachers can help you learn.  But knowledge of the abstract 
principles can be important or even crucial in developing applied knowledge.  This is more and more the case as modern science 
develops.  In earlier times, a person could learn how to build houses with only on-the-job training.  Nowadays you must understand 
such principles as those of electricity and heat flow. 
     As its name suggests, abstract knowledge is further away from the specifics of a particular situation, and it is comprised of 
general principles.  These principles make up the body of knowledge found in print in libraries.  Imagine that the domain of 
knowledge is a jungle maze containing millions of books and magazines, and billions of pieces of knowledge, with a secret code to 
its paths and contents.  Your problem is to wend your way through this maze so that you arrive at the pieces of knowledge that you 
seek for a particular purpose.  This is a formidable intellectual challenge.  
     Chapters 3-2 and 3-3 teach about acquiring applied and especially abstract knowledge.  The first place to turn for knowledge 
is where the knowledge may already exist.  Chapter 3-2 tells you how to mine libraries and experts.  Chapter 3-3 presents the 
basic principles of scientific research that are applicable when you must create reliable knowledge on your own.  
     The scientific method may be thought of as simply using all the capacities of your mind as systematically as possible.  But a 
checklist of the important issues to keep in mind, and the order in which you should consider them, can be useful.  Violations of 
these same principles are much the same as the errors we make in drawing everyday conclusions, as will be discussed in Chapters 4-
5and 4-6.  And many of the same principles are the converse of the logical fallacies that have been known to philosophers since 
the Greeks.  This is a nice example of how the same principles of thinking appear in several different contexts. 
     The entire business of creating ideas, obtaining relevant information, and evaluating the alternatives is a back-and-forth 
process, rather than a neat series of steps, even though it is necessary to neaten up the process when presenting it here in on 
the printed page. 


                            FOOTNOTE
     1For example, Michael Polanyi, with Friedrich Hayek's approbation. 
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