How To Benefit From Not Knowing
Long, long time ago, Mother Nature had a choice to make. Humans could either have accurate brains that were really slow, or inaccurate brains that were really fast.
And because we were in an environment with a bunch of instinctive driven predators, taking a long time to come to a decision wasn’t the best strategy.
This is why we tend to generalize, delete, and distort, as they say in NLP.
This is why we also never really have anything close to a full understanding of what’s going on around us.
For the most part, this works out pretty well. While it is a good idea to think things through a little bit, and avoid leaping before you look, it’s never a good idea to think too long.
One pretty good skill to have is a sense of balance. You need to know enough about a situation to feel you’ve got a decent chance of coming out ahead, but you’ve also got to be able to move forward when the time comes, even though you may not have all the information.
Easy To Lose Balance
Those that consistently act when they know just enough to get going generally do much better.
They realize that you’ll never know everything. They also realize that even if you mess up, you’ll gain valuable insight. Not only about the world, but about yourself.
Make no mistake, this is a very, very rare skill. I used to know a guy that barely escaped from a Southeast Asian country as it collapsed into communism. He was a genius in electrical engineering.
But he was also able to make decisions when nobody else could. Pretty soon he was the “go to guy” whenever his company was up against a fork in the road.
Because of this skill, this ability to balance knowledge and risk, and move forward with confidence, he was paid a LOT more than if he’d ONLY been a genius electrical engineer.
This is one of those rare “meta skills” that few people even know exist. One that will take you much, much farther than any “content-based” skill.
The ability to act. To make decisions. To learn from every action.
If you can do this, the world will follow.