The Superpower You Don’t Know
It’s tempting to have all the answers.
It’s daunting to admit that you might need help.
We’re incentivized to project confidence and forego the vulnerability that comes with uncertainty.
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And yet…
We unleash a profoundly powerful superpower every time we instead choose to speak these three magic words:
I don’t know.
Because when we find the courage to say those three magic words, amazing things often happen.
- We open the door to learn something
- We give others the opportunity to help us and contribute
- We’re no longer on the hook for something we don’t actually know
- We get to set an example and slowly deconstruct the illusion that people have to know it all
All of this is significantly more powerful than the alternative.
“I am aware of my ignorance, which is better, at least, than being ignorant of my ignorance, as my contemporaries are.”
-Socrates
This amazing superpower isn’t about not knowing. It’s about being open to learning.
It’s about a willingness to declare and embrace one’s own ignorance as a stepping stone toward growth.
On the surface, this seems like a simple proposition. In practice, we’re more likely to lean into a cognitive bias that leads us to believe we know more than we do, or to feign competence out of fear.
The Practice of Not Knowing
This shows up in our lives earlier than we think.
When my daughter was 4, she had a traumatic experience of falling underwater because she was overconfident in her ability to swim. Luckily, we were there by her side and she was unharmed.
In the same year, she hesitated to take on challenges at school out of fear that she might fail.
In many ways, adults are not all that different.
We often believe we are better at something than we actually are, because we haven’t learned enough about it to see how little we actually know.
And at the same time, many of us hesitate to take a chance at learning something new for fear of failing.
In both cases, the superpower that takes us down the right path is the practice of not knowing. It shows up as doubt when we’re overconfident, and as openness when we’re afraid.
Having the courage to boldly own that you do not know is an ability few people practice regularly.
If you pause one second longer to check in with yourself, you might just find that you don’t know what happens next…and that is where the magic happens.
So, I’ll leave you with two final questions to ponder:
Where in your life right now are you pretending to know more than you do? And where are you holding back because you’re afraid you don’t know enough?
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