Blissful ignorance

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
-- Confucius

To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.

-- Mark Twain

It seems the older I get, the less I know.

When I first entered college, I was pretty sure that I knew everything. After all, high school had been a breeze. I ached to get out in the real world. A stupid piece of paper should not be required! Clearly, I should not be required to sit through interminable classes just to prove that.

Well, of course that wasn't true. Many of my classes were interesting and full of useful tidbits. I hadn't known what I didn't know.

When I finally did graduate college, I felt, that there was really nothing else to learn. At that point, I had been working as a professional computer programmer for 4 years. I had a full undergraduate education under my belt. What more could I need to know that I hadn't already learned in the school of hard knocks?

Well, my sainted mother convinced me to go to graduate school. I didn't think I would learn much, but it was certainly better than working for a living!

Well, of course I was wrong.

The courses went into depths that I didn't know existed. Subtle pieces of the larger puzzle all fell into place. It was clear that I was ignorant before, but now, NOW, certainly I knew all there was to know.

Well, needless to say, this pattern of certainty followed by an uncovering of my ignorance repeated itself over and over. Now, I've given up. I realize that there is an impossibly large world of knowledge out there.

I even realize that it's OK not to know everything.

This actually has relevance in interviewing. We all go in to an interview hoping to be able answer every problem correctly. We want to show our vast command of our discipline. We worry that giving a wrong answer will get us shown the door.

This isn't always the case. In the real world, it's OK to accept that we don't know something.

In an earlier post, I noted that one of the hedge funds I interviewed at asked harder and harder questions to see how I functioned under pressure. The actual purpose of the questioning was, unsurprisingly, to see how I handled hard questions that I couldn't answer off the top of my head.

A friend of mine, the head of engineering at a web company, says that he always asks questions to the breaking point. He does this, not to put candidates in their place, but rather to get them to the point where he can try to teach them something.

He wants to know if they can learn.

He wants employees who can take direction, learn, and apply their new knowledge. What he doesn't want is a pompous, know-it-all employee who will accept neither criticism nor direction.

Some of the big banks and prop shops I know seem to pick their interns and new traders for their ignorance.

These new hires generally think they were picked because of their inherent awesomeness.

I think, rather, they were hired because they were ignorant. These fresh young faces are ignorant of the larger world and can be taught the proper way of trading/analyzing/programming/whatever.

I don't think their ignorance bothers them, the Dunning-Kruger experiments show that people can be blissful in their ignorance -- unbothered by the petty realities of facts and the way things actually work.

Over time, most of them will discover, as I did, that there is a huge world of knowledge that we don't know. We will even come to know that there are things we cannot know.

We can all embrace the idea of lifelong learning.

And what of those who never discover their ignorance? Well, the world has a place for them too.

We call them managers.