When knowledge is power?
Knowledge can generate power, but only if you are the expert in the field. This means that you are at the top 10 percent of your domain.
This condition is undoubtedly hard to meet. Historical data indicates that professionals take many years of focused hard work and discipline to achieve their professional goals. The most well-known rule showing the association of the amount of time of deliberate practice with expertise is 10000 hours. Even though this figure is not absolutely exact, it gives us the sense of how-long it takes to be an expert in a field.
In addition to character, learning is to build up human capital. In other words, to accumulate ability to do things we would like to. And it takes from 10 to 20 years to learn the basic knowledge and domain-specific knowledge, plus internship or direct exposure to real-life work to know-how-to-do well a profession. From there, it demands further 10 years to practice the profession until few of us can obtain the top positions in each domain.
Knowledge only turns into truly power when we possess powerful know-how, which can influence how people think, do and behave. Otherwise, knowledge is not power, it is seemly just a service – an ordinary commodity.
When you earn the power of knowledge, you have all respect, admiration, fame and opportunities, and most importantly is self-satisfaction.