It still beats me how some people still claim to know everything or act like they do.
Most times you can sense it from the way they talk.
The fact still remains that ‘we can’t know everything’. No matter how you hard try, it won’t work. The brain wasn’t built to know everything.
I’ve been attempting to create some Web projects recently. This foray exposed the many things I didn’t know.
I didn’t know that:
- I could use a different host for my email aside from my domain host
- I could increase my free email host quota from two to ten
- I could get a domain name for free, if I’ve paid for web hosting
- I could get a web hosting at a very low cost
Well I had an idea but not knowledge. I had a mental model of how these things work. That’s the con of untested mental models. They seem correct to you, but there’s a high likelihood that they are incorrect.
It’s Natural
Do you know that ‘forgetting’ is actually a good thing? You may want to ask the guy that never forgets. The human brain actively ‘forgets’ to prevent active overload.
You can’t know everything because there will always be someone better and more knowledgeable than you are or will be. This is why you need to tap into the knowledge other people have or have discovered. This is why you need to ask questions.
Learn on a daily basis.
If you can’t do everything, then you can’t know everything.
It’s an Advantage
You do not need to know everything. Have you heard of the Pareto’s principle?
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
The simplest implementation of this principle is to:
Focus on the important 20% of things that bring 80% of returns.
Attempting to know everything or pretending to be is a total waste of your time.
This is a reminder to people who feel and act like they know everything.
This is an advice to people who are trying to learn new stuff.
You can’t know everything. You shouldn’t know everything.
Know the important and relevant things.
