Monday morning cup of thoughts...
"I don't know. Let me look into that."
I wanted to repeat something I wrote in a post last week. I’ve had several people recently admit that they feel insecure or stupid if they don’t know about something that someone else is talking about. I’ve thought about this premise for years, and it’s nice to share my thoughts now that I have an audience.
While knowledge is power…
There’s no crime in not knowing what you don’t know.
“I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer, unless perhaps you’re getting paid to know the answers, and then maybe “I don’t know” isn’t your best response.
I’m unsure when it became necessary to know everything or how it even became possible. And here’s the thing, what we don’t know likely has more to do with our interests than our IQ.
Life would be pretty dull if I had nothing left to learn.
When I was a brand new Flight Instructor I learned a lot from my first student. He was a nuclear engineer getting his Private Pilots license. He said,” If you don’t know the answer to something I ask, don’t BS me. We can learn it together.” To this day I’m always learning.
““I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer, unless perhaps you’re getting paid to know the answers, and then maybe “I don’t know” isn’t your best response.”
I’m going to argue that if you don’t know the answer it’s always better to say you don’t know. After years as a consultant, where I was sort of being paid to know the answers, I saw way too many people pretend to know the answer when they didn’t and it always was a disservice.