It Empowers You to Admit When You Don’t Know
This is positive, despite the idea that the opposite is true.
Some people cannot admit to ever being wrong. Similarly, you probably know someone who knows a lot, and/or a little, about seemingly everything. Still, for all that you can and do know, what you don’t know doesn’t make you less.
How much is there to know? So much. And when you are from different parts of the world, you have different bases of knowledge to work from. There is always, ALWAYS something new to learn. Nobody knows everything about anything.
No matter the scale you approach, there’s something big or small available to be learned. What’s more, there are things you almost certainly have no need or desire to know. Take quantum mechanics. If you’re a geek like I am or a scientist focused on the topic, quantum mechanics is interesting to you. If you’re a 2-year-old child, unless you’re a prodigy supergenius, quantum mechanics is something you don’t know.
I don’t need such an extreme to prove this. The things I need to know to do the jobs I do are hugely different from the things an airplane pilot needs to know to do their job. I don’t know all the ins and outs of flying a plane, and they probably don’t know all the ins and outs of writing and formatting books or website SEO.
Why and how does it empower you when you don’t know? Because it means you have room to grow.
An open mind is open to possibility
I believe that the biggest problem with a closed mind is that you miss out. When you think you know everything about anything, you miss so many possibilities and so much potential.
One of the things I love learning as a sci-fi writer is physics. To be fair, my knowledge is super basic and lacking the math and a deeper understanding of the science. But even being able to understand what little of it I can opens me to learning more and making plausible explanations for elements of sci-fi tools and machines I write about.
Sometimes, you’re limited in what you can know because of your experience, environment, and other matters that make you, you. For example, as a cisgender middle-aged white male, I can learn all about the life experience of a young, queer, black cisgender female – but I can’t know what her experience is in depth. Part of that is because I can’t get into her head, heart, and soul. But a larger part is that my experiences and environment will be enormously different.
That doesn’t in any way lessen the value of learning. It just means that I can only learn so much, and there’s a lot I can’t and don’t know. And that’s okay.
Recognizing that and acknowledging it opens me to better look at the perspectives of others. That opens the way to growing and learning a lot.
Why admit when you don’t know?
Two of the best reasons to admit you don’t know are to open yourself to learning and having an open mind to new experiences. The former is about active, intentional learning. The latter is being receptive to unintentional learning from happenings.
Very, very little of what we experience is in our control. When you make peace with this truth, you open yourself to new and different. When you admit you don’t know something, you are holding the door open to learning.
The problem here is fear. Lots of forces in the world look like they will belittle, berate, and scold you for not knowing. Too many messages out there create this utterly false notion that when you don’t know something, you’re missing out, are open to ridicule, and/or are lesser than him/her/them.
Again, nobody knows everything about anything. Even the foremost expert on any given topic doesn’t know everything. Why? Because of change. Everything everywhere changes. It’s the only constant in the Universe.
Growing up, I knew there were 9 planets in this solar system. But now, there are 8. I learned that this is because they reclassified Pluto. So what I know has changed. Guess what? There might be a wholly different 9th planet in this solar system yet to be discovered. So, again, change means I don’t know what I don’t know.
That’s not something to fear. The problem is the weaponization of fear and how that creates unnecessary division. Many of these get centered around knowledge and its availability. Weaponization is when matters like institutional racism go unchecked, and equality takes a back seat to someone’s political agenda.
Don’t know? Good. What can you do with that?
You can choose to learn. Or not
There are things I don’t know that I have zero need to know. Why? Because they have no impact on my life, they aren’t important for me to live my life, or they are utterly unrelated to me.
The challenge here is not to be closed-minded to the point of being unkind, uncompassionate, or unempathetic. I do need to recognize that people are being made to struggle unfairly to one degree or another, even if I’m not, so that I can help by voting for people who give a shit about that, and so on.
Things that have no impact on my life or aren’t important to me are things like repairing my own car, pro-sports stats, how to cook insects, and things of that nature. Saying I don’t know these things and choosing not to, are of no impact to not just to me, but to other people I interact with. It’s important to recognize that not choosing to learn how to cook insects is not at all the same as choosing not to learn to see what challenges other people face that I don’t (so that I’m not contributing to those challenges).
It empowers you to admit you don’t know something because that opens you to choosing and deciding to learn new things. If they are things it’s good to know (like why certain institutions are unfair to certain people) or that don’t necessarily matter to or for you (like underwater basket weaving), you can choose to learn them or not. Learning helps with growth, empowerment, and being able to give more to help others grow, learn, and gain empowerment.
Don’t know? Okay. Do you care to? The choice is yours, and that’s powerful and empowering.
Becoming empowered by admitting when you don’t know isn’t hard
It’s all about practicing active conscious awareness (mindfulness) of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and the positivity or negativity of your approach to direct your actions.
When you recognize and acknowledge that there is almost an infinite amount of things to know, and nobody knows everything about anything, you can use not knowing to open yourself to learning something new. Knowing that everyone doesn’t know everything, you can make choices and decisions to learn and become more open to learning something, and the potential and possibilities that learning can lead you to.
This empowers you. When you’re empowered, that can, in turn, empower others around you.
Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity — from the vast cylinder that exists between them — shifts life in ways that open you to more potential, possibility, and the like. From there, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you in the here and now.
The better aware you are of yourself, here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you and empower them, too. That is an amazing conduit to help reason overcome fear in the collective consciousness.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the six-hundred-thirty-eighth (638) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, reblog, and spread the positivity.
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