Reducing the unknown unknowns

When I started out on my journey to running my own business, I had a (relatively) small world of things that I knew about being an entrepreneur, and of course that meant there was an enormous world of things which I was naively unaware of. Over time, and as my experience has grown and I have been involved in more and more situations, I am growing my sphere of influence. In other words, as my universe expands, a large number of things I didn’t even know existed have come into frame as things I need to learn about.

So to use Donald’s words, every day I am increasing the amount of things that I know I don’t know about (known unknowns), while also — hopefully — increasing the amount of things I do know I know about (known knowns).

Rather than have this increase in known unknowns drag me down, make me feel like I was a failure, or even worse, make me give up entirely, I have used it as motivation to keep going and keep learning. And this is a personality trait that has only developed for me in the last couple of years.

Growing up, I was one of those annoying kids at school that never paid attention, never did homework, but was consistently at the top of the class. I was ‘gifted’ (how gifted I’ll never know since I never really tried) with a photographic memory and an ability to grasp new concepts instantly. The problem was I had no interest in actually going out and “learning” new things, because everything was handed to me on a plate (i.e. the teachers told us what to learn), and so I never learned HOW to learn. I cruised through high school, cruised through university (with a few bumps), and then crashed into my first job.

The real world is where they sort out the wheat from the chaff, and I was definitely the chaff. But how? I was so intelligent at school, so why wasn’t I an instant success in the corporate environment? With a lot of self-reflection, I believe that this was due to the statement above: I knew what I knew, and never tried to learn more. Or to put it another way, I stopped learning beyond the basic requirements of my role.

I am incredibly blessed to be working with a co-founder who not only shares my values (see my post on shared values in your co-founder here), but also shares my passion for learning and expanding our knowledge universe. We are both thriving from learning all of the nuances of running your own company, like “How the **** are we going to be able to afford to build the platform?” and “Where do we even start looking for Angel Investors that are interested in a sector that half the population calls ‘Aged Care’ (it’s not), and the other half says ‘I know nothing about that sector’ (meaning we have to take half an hour explaining what Retirement Living is)!” But these questions and situations don’t get us down, they give us energy to think, to learn, to stretch ourselves, and to ultimately grow as people as we live through these experiences, and expand our knowledge as we go.

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