I Don’t Know: The Power of Curiosity

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No. They aren’t “I love you.”

While those three words are special, the love will die quickly without these three words.

“I don’t know.”

Whether you say them out loud or in your head, these three words are critical to really enjoying life as it is.

The alternative to “I don’t know” is “I know.” Even when I don’t know something or I’m wrong, I’ll say “I knew that.” The reality is that I didn’t know. I was pretending in the face of reality.

Through schooling we are taught to never be wrong and when we didn’t know the answer, we just hid by avoiding eye contact with the teacher and hoping that we didn’t get cold called. Even then, we were pretending like we knew when we didn’t.

Why? Because we were “supposed” to know. Since then, we started living our lives like a multiple choice test assuming that there is one right answer. But the number of ways to live this life are infinite to the degree that we stay curious.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. – Rumi

The key to lifelong learning is staying curious. Curiosity didn’t kill the cat. Curiosity helped the cat realize it had 9 lives. Without being curious, it would have been confined by one. The cat was willing to risk being wrong and being wrong opened it up to more life.

In the same way, we could live 9 lives in one lifetime, but because we oftentimes get stuck in pretending like we know everything, learning tends to stop after formal schooling along with personal growth and life becomes stagnate. We become adult-like at the age or 18 or 22 instead of remaining childlike throughout our entire lives. Life becomes about confirming what we think we know instead of exploring the depths of what we don’t know and hoping that deep inside we aren’t wrong rather than being open to all of the possibilities that exists.

The “I don’t know” mindsets can positively affect every aspect of our personal and professional lives if we allow it to. Here is how:

Career

If I think that my first career is it, I’ve already lost. The 40-40 Club is closed. The idea of working at one company for 40 hours per week for 40 year years is dead. When we pretend we know what Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the economy is going to do we get rigid and angry when the economy doesn’t change in our favor rather than figuring out how to accept and adapt to what is actually happening.

Whether you plan to change careers or not, you career will change. – Jullien Gordon

I have to stay curious about the economy, my industry, and my options. There are jobs out there that we don’t even know exists that may be a better fit for our gifts, talents, strengths, and skills. We aren’t married to our employers. Why would we stop seeking, especially in our 20s and 30s. Because of safety and security?

I encourage people who have jobs to keep dating by interviewing once a year even if they don’t have any intention to leave their current job just to see what’s out there and to know their value in different context.

Family

If I don’t stay curious about my wife, I will lose her no matter how much I love her. Despite the fact that we live together, her amazing gift for introspection helps her learn new things about herself every day. All of her new insights don’t get verbally communicated to me, but they change who she is from the inside out. While I know her well, I admit to her that there is so much that I don’t know about her and that that is the reason I am so happy that I have a lifetime to continue learning who she is.

If I don’t even know who I am yet, how can I pretend to truly know someone else. – Jullien Gordon

I also tried to do my family tree on ancestry.com and I couldn’t get passed my grandparents on my dad’s side. Not only did I not know their names, I had no clue who they were as human beings. I also assume that I know my little brothers, but they are changing and evolving. I know the 14 and 12-year-old versions of them when I left for college and some of their core traits remain the same, but so much has changed over the last 15 years, I can’t pretend like I know them in the same way. The same goes for our close friends who we consider to be family.

Education

For many people, learning stops after college. Some of us didn’t even learn in college. If we had to give a spontaneous TED Talk on what we majored in on the day of graduation, most of us wouldn’t last 18 minutes because we crammed for exams and then dumped the irrelevant information in the garbage bin on our way out.

An unexamined life is not worth living. – Socrates

Ask yourself, how many books have you read in the past 90 days? None? 1? 3? 5? Granted, learning happens differently once formal education is done, the key to lifelong learning is being intentional about it. If we run through life without any self-reflection we aren’t learning—we are just seeing how fast we can run. We play survival of the fittest instead of survival of the quickest to adapt. I got this law degree or MBA or PhD or real estate license or other trade and I’m going to run with it and hope that it gets me through this entire game called life.

It’s dangerous not to stay curious. But once we step into adulthood our fear of uncertainty causes us to pretend like we know and knew what was right. Instead of trying to be right all of the time, I want to be open. I don’t want to get stuck in my ways. I don’t want to be the same person 5 years from now as I am today with simply more money and more stuff. I want to release my judgements, assumptions, and tightly held beliefs about my career, family, and the world in order to experience something greater that I even know is possible.

I see my path but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it. – Rosalia de Castro

Stay curious. Ask questions. And say “I don’t know” more often.

Wishing you more happy hours,