Stand with arms spread wide. The tiniest crescent of fingernail on your leftmost finger represents all of human existence. The rest, life on Earth. What an absurd blip we are.
Now, instead of time, pretend your arms span all knowledge. That same fingernail tip now represents everything you know. From there to your knuckle is what you know you don’t know (like quantum physics or what happened in Tenet). The rest? That’s what you don’t know you don’t know.
What you know is a vanishingly thin slice of all the knowledge in the world. Yet this small slice shapes your entire worldview.
When you’re assessing your intelligence and self-awareness, humility is the only rational perspective to take.
The fastest way to gain intelligence right now isn’t to cram facts into your head – it’s to embrace how little you know. The moment you accept the enormity of your ignorance is the moment you start getting smarter. Treat ignorance like an invitation to learn rather than a weakness to hide.
Be confident in your intellect, but don’t ever, ever pretend to know something you don’t. Have the backbone to say, “I don’t know.” And if it matters, follow that with, “but I can find out.”
Accepting that you don’t know everything can shield you from becoming too pessimistic or cynical. Those eye-rollers (who act like they know everything) are often trapped in a cycle of deriding things they don’t fully understand, or can’t fathom solutions for. They reflexively dismiss what they don’t know as either unknowable or unrealistic. This is an all-caps TRAP for people who are terrified of being outsmarted or proven wrong.
“There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.”
~Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain (Book)
“…As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”
~John Wheeler