It is not enough to simply know something. You must be able to do something with that knowledge. Apply it, create with it, pull it apart and reassemble it in different ways.
Richard Feynman famously said "I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something". That has never been more true than it is today. The internet has made information into a commodity, and one that is exceedingly well supplied. It doesn't matter if you can remember what something is when you can find it out with a few vague keywords and twenty seconds.
To succeed in the modern world you need to go deeper. You must be able to make use of the information you have, and know how to find out what you don't.
Bloom's Taxonomy is a useful framework here. It describes six levels of understanding, each building on the last:
1. Remember: You can recall a fact. Helpful, but not much more than that.
2. Understand: You can explain it to someone else, discuss it, and make predictions based on your understanding.
3. Apply: You can use the knowledge to actually do something. Solve a problem, build something, make a decision.
4. Analyse: You can break the subject into its constituent pieces and understand how they fit together to create the whole.
5. Evaluate: You can assess why things are as they are, compare approaches, and identify relative strengths and weaknesses.
6. Create: You can take what you've learned and combine it with other knowledge to produce something new. This is the deepest level of understanding.
The point of this framework is that knowing something, level one, is the floor, not the ceiling. To operate in a world where the price of entry is no longer simply regurgitating information, you need to demonstrate a capacity for further thought.
This takes more time and more effort, but building your capacity for challenging thought is no different from attending the gym. Nobody expects it to be easy. It is hard, and that's the whole point.
The nature of work is shifting in this direction too. Automation is steadily removing the busywork from daily tasks, and the human contribution is becoming more abstract and strategic. Take manufacturing: humans are less and less involved in physically building things, because robots are faster and safer. But the design process is becoming more complex, requiring deeper expertise as technology advances.
This will continue accelerating as more routine work is automated. On the other side, it frees us up to make use of our imagination, creativity and thoughtfulness. But those require more than just knowing something, so we will need to get better at going deeper.