I sat outside on a windless night. All was silent. Then, in every direction, dry leaves began crinkling on the ground. I held out my hand to catch the first drops of rain. But there was nothing. No rain, no wind. Just the crinkling.
Here are two words you may never see together again: Worm emergence.
As I took my flashlight to the crinkling piles of leaves, I saw earthworms retract into the dirt. There was a slight delay. Once the little artificial sun I held had shone on them for half a second, a reflex kicked in and they disappeared, like faceless eels yanking back into their holes. What were they up to? Why would hundreds of worms conspire to emerge at once? To perform a little mucus ballet?
I still don’t know. I looked, but have no concrete answer. The more I learn, the more I find that I only grasp a few atoms of this peculiar world.
When you assess your intelligence and self-awareness, humility is the only rational perspective to take. As the saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Why this matters:
- What you know is a vanishingly thin slice of all the knowledge in the world. Yet this small slice shapes your entire worldview.
- The fastest way to gain intelligence right now isn’t to cram facts into your head, it’s to embrace how little you know. The moment you accept the enormity of your ignorance is the moment you start getting smarter.
- Be confident in your intellect, but don’t ever, ever pretend to know something you don’t. Have the guts to say, “I don’t know.” And if it matters, follow that with, “but I can find out.”
- Treat your lack of knowledge like an invitation to learn rather than a weakness to hide.
Accepting that you don’t know everything can shield you from becoming too pessimistic or cynical. People who act like they know everything are often trapped in a cycle of dismissing or deriding things they don’t fully understand. This is an all-caps TRAP for those terrified of being outsmarted or proven wrong.
A smart person, regardless of how much they know, walks the shoreline. They look out, see the vast ocean of what they don’t know fill the horizon, and they’re not scared. They just wonder what’s out there.
“There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.”
~Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain (Short Story)
“…As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”
~John Wheeler
