The Jeff Cavins Show (Your Catholic Bible Study Podcast) - Knowledge Hoarding and the Solution

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

Do you struggle with knowledge hoarding? There is so much information to consume but so often that knowledge is rarely put into action. Jeff offers three steps to help you take the knowledge you have and put it into action. Snippet from the Show Knowledge is not meant to gather dust. It is meant to be put into action. Email us with comments or questions at [e-mail]. Text “jeffcavins” to 33-777 to subscribe and get Jeff’s shownotes delivered straight to your email! Or visit ascensionpress.com/thejeffcavinsshow for full shownotes!

Welcome to the Jeff Kaven show, where we talk about the Bible, discipleship, and evangelization, putting it all together in living as activated disciples. This is Episode 268 Knowledge Horting and The Solution. Looking forward to sharing some good news with you. Okay, are you one of those people? Either I'm talking about two kinds of people. are you one of those people who hordes all kinds of things? Or are you the kind of person that you simply can't think of or put anything together unless you take care of that mess in your office or in the family room, in the kitchen, or whatever? Well, welcome to the show. I'm Jeff Kavenson.

It's good to have you joining me today on the heels of our activated disciple seminar that we just finished that last week. And today we're moving on to more things, all related to being a disciple. of the Lord Jesus Christ, and I have landed on this topic today, knowledge hoarding and the solution. Now, I know you are familiar with regular hoarding, but we're going to talk about knowledge hoarding today. And hopefully by the time we're done, you're going to be slim and fit and ready to go. And you're going to be able to use all the knowledge and all the wisdom that you've been gathering over the years. You're going to be able to organize it and use it for the good of the kingdom, which means your life and your family's life as well.

If you want the show notes, I encourage you to go ahead and text my name, Jeff Kaven's, all one word, and you can text it to the number 3377. And then we'll get the show notes to you. Have some scriptures in today's show, some other interesting things. But let's get going on this. I got to ask you the question. Have you ever watched those television shows that feature hoarders? I have. It's kind of funny, isn't it, how our culture has made entertainment out of somebody else's compulsion or is even an illness now? There's a psychologist who call this an illness, and yet we're spectators watching these shows.

And it's unreal. It really is. And I've actually gone into three homes now over the years. three homes that are in that category of extreme hoarding where I walked in aisles in the house with stuff that was that was accumulating in the house that was about six feet tall on both sides of the aisle. It kind of felt claustrophobic and there's cats running around and everything. Well, we're all familiar with that type of show and we pray for people who do struggle with that. But there's piles of magazines from the 1960s to the present, all of the Life magazine.

The Look Magazine's, National Geographic, all that. And there are containers, boxes of batteries, past junk mail, every gift they ever received, boxes of past tax information, doll collections, Tupperware stacks, old album sleeves with no records in them, clothes with the tags still on them, and it goes on and on. Well, I looked up this on the Internet, and I found a couple of sources that were talking about hoarding. And one website said that hoarding disorder is a persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions because of a perceived need to save them. A person with hoarding disorder experiences distress at the thought of even getting rid of the items, excessive accumulation of items, regardless of the actual value occurs. Also, they said hoarding often creates such cramped living conditions that homes may be filled to capacity.

with only narrow pathways, as I was mentioning earlier, winding throughout stacks of clutter. Countertops, sinks, stoves, desks, stairways, and virtually all other surfaces are usually piled with stuff. And when there's no more room inside, the clutter may spread to the garage, vehicles, yard, even storage facilities. That's really an industry that has grown so much in the last 10 years or so. And here's the result. Possessions that crowd and clutter your walking spaces in living areas and make the space, they make it unusable for the intended purpose, like you can't be able to, you're not able to cook in the kitchen or use the bathroom to bathe. The clutter ends up with no working space or walking space and it makes the space unusual or unusable, I should say, for the intended purpose. Frozen in terms of doing anything with it. It's just too much, and you don't know where to start. And how do you retrieve what you want? The articles went on, and I'll just end with this, before we get into kind of the knowledge hoarding.

They said the people with hoarding disorders typically save items because, number one, they believe these items are unique or will be needed at some point in the future. Number two, the items have important emotional significance serving as a reminder of happier days or representing beloved people or pets. And number three, they feel safer when surrounded by the things that they save. And number four, they don't want to waste anything. All right. Well, okay, so we know that there is a hoarding epidemic going on in our country. Today, this turned into entertainment. And there is an epidemic in our country when it comes to overeating, taking in too many calories. But there's also an epidemic when it comes to taking in too much information. That's right. Too much information. Knowledge hoarding. We take in so much information and we simply don't use it. And you know what I'm

talking about. We've all struggled with it at one time or another. You get caught up in network news or big news networks online. And you are listening constantly to whether it's Fox or, you're or CNN or MSNBC or whatever it might be. But it's on in the background all the time. And we suddenly get news flash, you know. Everyone looks at the TV and it was something they were saying three days ago. So network news is really a source of a lot, a lot of information that people don't know what to do with. Magazines are another thing.

You know, I used to go to the airport and go traveling. I had to speak somewhere and I'd stop at the magazines. stand and there would be this magazine that would catch my attention. I think, ah, that looks interesting. And I'd buy it and I get on the airplane and start reading a bit. And after reading it for like an hour, I figured out there's really nothing in here that I really want and I would leave it in the magazine pouch in the seat ahead of me. There's social media, TikTok, Instagram.

You got to admit, social media is like a drug. People get on Instagram and they're just with their thumb flashing through one thing after another after another and same with TikTok and before you know it you start by looking at just a couple things and then before you know what you've been on there for 45 minutes or an hour or more movies are another one and then also things like audible now a little caveat there audible can be used as very good thing if you're listening to some book or you know history deal you know history types of of things but you can get into just constantly listening to more and more information. So the information age has created a new problem, and that is that we

passively consume information, mindless consumption, which crowds are thinking, their judgment, and our peace of mind. I was listening. There I go. I was listening to a show last week. A guy was talking about how he has given up all social media. And he said, you would not believe what this has done in my life. I feel free. My mind is clear. I'm thinking clearly. I have cogent thoughts. He was so thankful and he said, I'll never go back. I'm not going to stuff my head with all this mindless information, but I'm going to be picky about what I read and what I listen to. So some try to take care of this knowledge hoarding by taking limitless notes. They try to take care of this by just taking all kinds of notes. And then it becomes note hoarding. So they take the

information from a book or from a CD and then so they can get rid of the book, I suppose, or the CD. And then they start to write all kinds of notes. They go to a conference, they listen to a tape, and they take as many notes as possible. And the result is piles of notes that are not easy to navigate and most likely forgotten. The problem is that we have mixed the information that we will never use with the gems that we should treasure. But the greatest problem is we don't think. I want to get to that in just a little bit.

We don't think. We are underlining in books. We're writing notes down. We have notebooks. We have pieces of paper. We have all kinds of audio recordings. We have all kinds of things in our smartphone, but we never get to the point where we think about these things and employ these bits of knowledge and wisdom in our life. So we don't think through the knowledge and the insights that we thought were so valuable.

We capture it, we save it, we collect it, we highlight ideas, but rarely act on it or externalize the ideas or knowledge. So I want to ask you a question, as we kind of take this apart today and look at knowledge hoarding and what we should do about it, I would ask you the very important question of what is your relationship with the knowledge that you consume? What is your relationship with it? Is it just a fleeting kind of excitement that you heard something kind of cool or saw something that you thought was really deep and you wrote it down or you kept that recording somewhere in your computer. We fill our minds with other people's thoughts, don't we? It's other people's thoughts that we are hoarding. But do they become your thoughts? Do these bits of knowledge that you

collect, that you underline, that you have cards all over your desk? Have they become your thoughts, your words? That's what we want to really get at today as we talk together, is what do we do with all this information? What's the solution? Okay? Now I'm going to take a break when I come back, I want to give you the solution to this. And I'm going to share with you some things that I've done in my own life, because I got to tell you a number of years ago, if you went into my office, you'd see hundreds and thousands of books. And you would see all kinds of file cabinets with all kinds of paper notes. And you would see stacks on the floor and all kinds of index cards. It was just too much.

And I couldn't navigate it. but I'm going to share with you what I did, and today I'm silent. Today I'm doing well with the knowledge and how I organize it, how I use it, and how I most importantly think it through and put it into practice in my life. So we'll be back in just a moment. You're listening to The Jeff Kaven Show. Imagine this. You're walking down the street and a Christian at a table with a bunch of pamphlets to ask you.

Have you been saved? What would you do? Would you know how to respond? Hi, I'm Dr. Andrew Swofford, and I'm co-presenter along with Jeff Kavins in Ascension's new great adventure Bible study, Romans, the Gospel of Salvation. In this study, we teach you the biblical foundations for the Catholic teaching on salvation, how to explain salvation quickly and easily to non-Christians. What St. Paul really meant by works not leading to salvation and how we can enter more deeply

into Christ. Paul's letter to the Romans has been at the center of reflection, conversion, and controversy from the very beginning, and it's widely considered his greatest. work. I invite you to start a small group in your home or parish and embark on this great adventure. Romans, the Gospel of Salvation, is available for pre-order right now and for purchase on September 1st, 2019. To order, visit ascensionpress.com. Well, thanks for coming back. We're talking about knowledge hoarding and what is the solution. We're going to look at that on this part of today's show. Before I get into that,

I want to remind you of something. We got some big things coming up in the future. This October, I'm going to be leading a pilgrimage to Turkey and Greece in the footsteps of St. Paul. Many of you have written to me and you wrote to me and you said that you were always interested in going on a pilgrimage to Turkey and Greece. That's what we're going to be doing in October. So if you're interested in that, you can go to my website, jeffcavens.com. And coming up in January, we have another pilgrimage to the Holy Land. That one's selling out.

If you want to go in January with me and Emily, then go to my website and you can sign up for that. And I want to remind you of something. Clear your schedule next June. Clear your schedule. Not this June. Not June of 2022. I'm encouraging you to think about June of 2023 because Father Mike Schmitz, my good buddy and friend the Bible in a year, we're going to lead a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, an amazing one,

where we have singers, fantastic Catholic artists are going to be joining us in singing, and we've got some concerts, and Father Mike and I are going to be speaking at different sites. It's going to be incredible, and I hope you can come with us. Keep your schedule open. If you want to go to the Holy Land, save it till, if you don't want to go this January, save it to next June. And it's going to be incredible. Okay, so what's the solution here?

With all the knowledge hoarding that we're doing and all the information and you know it, it's just too much and you can't navigate it and you're kind of, you're kind of sick of it, right? Okay. So here's what we want to do. We don't want to just take notes. We want to make notes. Don't take notes.

We want to make notes. And the ideas are going to be recorded in. such a way that they're going to become yours. They're going to become yours. Now, one of the things that is really important to do here when it comes to taking notes or gaining knowledge or writing down wisdom is to link ideas so that they say something that ends in putting it into practice. Now, Father Mike Schmitz and I put together what was called an Insight Journal. An Insight Journal at a Ascension Press is a journal where you can write down the insights that are pure gold, and you can go back to them later, and you can share them with your relatives.

You can create an insight journal for your kids, for grandchildren. But the first thing that we need to do, and you don't need to use that. You can use anything. I'm going to introduce you to a piece of software that's free that I use, and then if you are analog, you can use index. cards. But the first thing you might want to do is just take the time to go through all that you have. Everything that you have been hoarding when it comes to knowledge and books and underlining and magazines and everything else. And I know that sounds a little bit daunting. It's kind of like

the hoarding shows on TV. The hardest part is to get them to actually throw the first thing away. And if you're like that, you know, it might be kind of difficult. But what you want to do is sift through it, and only keep what is the best. And you know that you might put it into practice someday. Could be writing, journal, speaking. You might be put this into practice as a writer or a speaker. You might want to teach your children someday with this information, this knowledge, or it's a comfort in tough times.

But you need to go through your notebooks and your index cards, maybe it's computer files. and just keep what is golden, what is really good, great quotes, great ideas, great books, keep that stuff, all right? And in a way, it's like sanctifying knowledge. Not all knowledge is the same. It's not all equal. And I did this years ago with my books. I had thousands of books. And I went through all of my library, and I probably took out, I don't know, 1,300, 1,400 books. and I gave them to seminaries and libraries. I knew I was never going to use them.

They looked good. They were impressive, but I knew I wasn't going to use them. So I paired down my library to the books that I knew were in my wheelhouse and I was going to use them. But you could say, well, Jeff, maybe someday. Well, yeah, someday, but I got to tell you, I don't think someday ever came around. And so I had to make a decision. I'm going to sanctify this pile of mess. And I'm going to keep the knowledge and the wisdom that right.

to the top. You know, Deuteronomy chapter six says, and these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart, and you shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. Scripture also says in Psalm 11911, I have laid up thy word in my heart that I might not sin against thee. You see, there's some bits of wisdom that are incredibly important, like the knowledge of the Word of God, insights into your faith, and so forth. And so go through all of your information, and that which you are not going to use, that which is superfluous, get rid of it, and just free yourself from it. There's nothing wrong with it. I've done that

with my library. I did it in my computer. I did. I went through hundreds of folders on my computer. And I did the hard work of getting rid of everything that was extraneous. And I wasn't going to use it. And I collected what I thought was the gems and the real knowledge I wanted to keep. and I organize that in a way that is retrievable. Now, this method that I used is called a bottom up method, bottom up, a top-down method of organizing all your information in your computer or in your folders, you know, your filing cabinets is a top-down model, and that is that you simply take all the information that you have

and you put it in folders named whatever. But you still have the same problem. And that is that now it's just organized a little bit better. But you've got all your quotes on the Eucharist. You got all your research on family teaching. You've got all the information about Mary. Okay. It's in folders and that's where it's going to stay.

Unless you create some kind of system that organized, and allows you to link information with other information or one bit of knowledge with another bit of knowledge so that you can start to see how this information that you save fits with or is associated with other information. Call me crazy, but this is the way I think, and I've also met an awful lot of other people who found that just knowledge tucked away

is not going to help you. you have to have a way of retrieving it and a way of connecting it to new information so that it becomes yours. You can think through this information. So you need to organize the knowledge in a way that is retrievable. Now what I did is I created a system where I took, now you can take either index cards, you know, those little index cards, or you can take plain text files on your computer, not word, not word perfect, not pages in Apple, but a plain text file. A plain text file is just the, it's the bare minimum. It's used on PCs and Mac. And here's the thing about it. It is searchable and it is future proof. So what I did is I created a system that starts with what I would call

atomic notes. An atomic note is a quote from John Paul II about Mary. An atomic note is a quote. An atomic note is a paragraph from the catechism. An atomic note is a verse from the Bible. An atomic note is a sentence that your favorite speaker said at a conference. An atomic note is one of Mother Angelicus quotes. An atomic note is something that St. Augustine wrote in his city, a city of God book, or his confessions, I should say. All right. So that's the lowest point note. That's an atomic note. now what you could do at that point is start linking your notes and what you do is you link one note with another in other words there's an association there that you can see and you can talk about you can explain that and so you want to link your data and if you use note cards you can write down one thought on

one side of the card and on the back of the card you can write down links to other cards and ideas. This method is actually called, it's a fancy word now, it's a German word that's very big among intellectuals and thinkers, and it's called the Zetelkastin method. The Zetlkastin method, which was developed by a man who took index cards like they had at the library years ago, and each card had a thought, and he linked all of his thinking. He had over 70,000 cards linked. I'm not expecting that you're going to do that, and I know I'm not going to do that but that's what he did and he wrote something like 600 books articles galore and it all came from this this database of linking thoughts and and you can do that with it with these index cards i use a

computer program to do it with my plain text files i went through my entire computer and i converted everything everything all my word documents i converted to text files did it take some time? Oh, yeah. But it was worth it. And so I used a program. It's free. It's called Obsidian. It's for PCs and Mac. I'm a Mac user. Obsidian, like the Stone, Obsidian. And this app allows me to take all of my data, which has been converted to plain text files. And then this program allows me to, watch this, to connect each idea with as many other ideas or atomic notes as I want to, which creates a web of nesting. neurons like your external brain. And you can even look at it on the computer and see,

wow, those are all my knowledge there. Here's how it's connected. All the shows that I've done and so forth. So let me ask you this. If you want me to, in a future show to go deeper into this type of thing to help you, then put it in the show comments. Just say, yeah, I'd love to hear more about that. Now, here's the idea, whether you're going to use an index card, or you're going to use an application on your computer, we need to think through the note or the idea. Now, here is the key to letting go of hoarding and knowledge and making the data valuable. You want to take concepts like in theology, church history, whatever it might be, catechetics, and you want to write them in your own words and collect them.

So what I have in my computer is I have everybody else's knowledge and thoughts that I have collected over the years. But the real key here, my friend, is to take those thoughts of St. Augustine and St. Thomas and John Paul II and your bishop or whoever, your parish priest, and to write them down in a way, think through them in a way that you can communicate it to a sixth grader. Now, if you can do that, you've thought through the concept, and now it's yours, and you can tag it as such, a bit of information on transubstantiation. I have thought through this. I can communicate it. And I think this is incredibly valuable when it comes to explaining the faith to others. Do you know how many people have been hoarding? They've been hoarding books and all kinds of quotes and things like that. And they've been reading books on faith, Bible, church, but they can not verbally explain transubstantiation or the communion of saints,

or the virtues, or vices. Isn't that something? They've been doing it all these years, but they can not verbalize it. And so what I'm encouraging you to do is to seriously do a spring cleaning because we're coming up to spring here now. It's going to be spring. In Minnesota, it's spring, but it's still cold. And I'm encouraging you to do a knowledge-based clean and to only keep those things that you feel that are going to be very valuable to you as far as doing them, teaching them, passing them on, putting them into your inside journal. Only keep those things and break them down to atomic notes. Like, for example, there might be an article and you read that article and there's only one or two thoughts

there that you want to keep and you write those down on a card or in a plain text file on the computer and you start linking this knowledge to where it continues and grows and starts to look like all the neurons in your in your brain you know what I'm going to take a picture of my network. And what I'm talking about here, I'll put it in the show notes for you. I'm going to take a picture. And every dot you see and all the lines that connect, that's my thinking. And that's what I can draw from and search from when it comes to writing or speaking or talking to my children or my grandchildren. And so we want to deal with this problem of you continually reading and going to conferences and writing things down and taking notes, but never being able to actually our

articulate it or think it through. So you see what I mean. Lots of past knowledge that is not presently useful. So we want to turn it around and start thinking. And the most important part of all of this is after you have taken in knowledge and underlined in books and you now put that on a card or in a text file, the most important thing after thinking through this stuff is putting it into practice. And I really think that a lot of us struggle with putting the truth into practice because we haven't thought through it and how we can apply it in our life. It's just an underline in a book. It's just a note in a notebook. It's just a CD in the corner of the office with a tag saying, really good. And so I want to encourage you now to do this. And I'd love to hear

from you. I really would to take your information, the knowledge you've acquired, and to break it down into atomic notes, start connecting it and think through it. Write it down in your own words and make it yours and create a stack of those or in your computer, a file of all of the things that you have thought through. Wow, it could be a new day for you. It really could. Hey, I want to thank you for joining me today. I really appreciate it and share the show with all of your friends and invite them to the party here is every week we talk about issues facing us as disciples how to grow in scripture how to grow in our faith how to become bold and witnessing how to become an activated disciple i appreciate that i really do and all the information that i'm talking to you about is

at ascensionpress dot com and also you can uh make comments on the show and pass it on to your friends i really appreciate that let me pray for you in the name of the father son and the whole Spirit, Lord Jesus, I thank you for my friend. And I ask you, Lord, to give all of us clarity when it comes to the truth and how to put all of this into practice, not to be knowledge hoarders, but really to take your faith, take our faith, to the next level and put it into practice. In Jesus' name, I pray. Amen. Love you, my friend. Look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you.