The Power of Ignorance: How creative solutions emerge when we admit what we don’t know

‘The wise man knows he doesn’t know. The fool doesn t know he doesn’t know’ – Lao Tzu. ‘In the West they only respect experts. But the expert mind is the closed mind.’ – Shunryu Suzuki

What’s the most important step in fixing a puncture? It isn’t jacking up the car, or taking the wheel off, or finding the puncture. There’s something more fundamental than any of those.

Something without which you can’t even begin to fix a puncture. The most important step is finding out you’ve got a puncture. Without that you can’t do anything. Instead of saying, ‘It’s just a bit bumpy, must be the road,’ and carrying on, you must acknowledge that something has changed and you don’t know what that is.

If you don’t admit you don’t know what’s happening, you can never find out. If you don’t find out, you can never change it. The most important step, always, is admitting you don’t know.

That’s the power of ignorance.