Knowing the Unknown
The most useful thing I have learned in my whole process of startups, and maybe even life for that matter, is the importance of the phrase “know what you don’t know”.
It is crucial to learn everything you can from everyone in your life, be it friends, family, engineers, venture capitalists, or complete strangers. Being able to learn means you know what you need to look for from each these interactions. Knowing what you need to look for means knowing what you don’t know. You should go into every interaction knowing exactly what new information you can extract. This isn’t selfish, it is merely efficient learning. Besides, you probably have lots of cool stuff to offer in return.
When people don’t know what they don’t know, they are bound to fail again and again. Unfortunately, this happens all the time, especially to those who are young or inexperienced. I have been definitely been guilty of it too, so I’m no exception. Knowing what you don’t know keeps you searching with tunnel vision, and if that great idea or strategy isn’t directly in front of you, you’re never going to hit it. From the perspective of success over a long period of time (let’s say, a career), this is so dangerous. It’s a recipe for having a long, tough, excruciating string of failures.
Not knowing what you don’t know is like tweaking variables in an equation to find the local maximum. Knowing what you don’t know means you are going to throw that whole notion away and find new variables you can to use to find the global maximum. Think outside the box, and throw away all of the artificial constraints you’ve put on your thought processes.
When planning, strategizing, or thinking, here’s some questions to think about:
- What concepts have I previously written off as ‘not-relevant’ to me?
- Who would have a new outlook on this and why?
- What about me or my experience is limiting how I look at things?
- Are there any tangential skill-sets or knowledge that I can acquire?
- Can I draw intuition from whole other areas, industries, genres?
If you adopt the “know what you don’t know” mindset, you go through extremely fast cycles of self-revision, become a wider/deeper thinker, and convey to others that you have put ego or image aside in exchange for great self-advancement. That’s the mark of someone who wants to win.
I can’t help but quote a great book written by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner called “Teaching as a Subversive Activity”, recommended by the wise Jared Kopf. Knowing what you don’t know is all about maximizing your ability to learn, and in this book they talk about the characteristics of learners. They say that good learners:
- Have confidence in their ability to learn
- Enjoy solving problems
- Know exactly what is relevant to their survival
- Rely on their own judgement to spot good and bad advice
- Do not fear being wrong
- Are not fast answerers
- Are flexible
- Have a profound respect for data and information
- Do not need to have one irrevocable solution to a problem
It’s clear that many if not all of these things are drivers for or can be driven by knowing what you don’t know. Nice! I can rest easy knowing that someone who actually knows what they are talking about agrees with me.
Tags: Learning, Perspective, Self-Advancement, Startups
