Thoughts of the Week: July 14th, 2025
The smartest thing you can do is admit what you don't know. The stupidest thing you can do is pretend that you do.
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The Certainty Trap
There's a difference between not knowing and pretending to know.
One builds credibility. The other destroys it.
Not knowing vs. fake knowing
Not knowing is a temporary state. It's the honest admission that you lack information, experience, or understanding about something specific. It's uncomfortable but actionable—you can learn, research, ask questions, or find someone who does know.
Fake knowing is a permanent trap. It's the performance of expertise you don't possess, driven by ego, insecurity, or the misguided belief that admitting ignorance is weakness. Once you fake it, you stop learning. You become invested in defending a position rather than discovering the truth.
The CEO who says "I don't understand the technical details, but here's what I need to know" gains respect and gets better decisions. The CEO who nods along in technical meetings while secretly lost makes worse decisions and loses credibility when the truth emerges.
The compound cost of certainty theater
Most professionals are terrified of saying "I don't know." They've been conditioned to believe that expertise means having all the answers, that leadership requires omniscience, that credibility depends on never appearing uncertain.
But this creates a perverse incentive: the more senior you become, the more dangerous it becomes to admit what you don't know.
So instead, we perform certainty. We speak with confidence about things we're guessing at. We make decisions based on incomplete information while pretending the information is complete. We become actors in our own expertise theater.
The result? Compound ignorance. Each fake-knowing moment builds on the last, creating elaborate houses of cards that eventually collapse under the weight of reality.
The strategic power of intellectual humility
The most effective people I know have mastered a counterintuitive skill: they're confident in their ability to figure things out, not in already having figured everything out.
They distinguish between core competencies (where they should know) and adjacent areas (where not knowing is acceptable, even expected). They're quick to say "I don't know, but I know who does" or "I don't know, but here's how I'd find out."
This isn't weakness—it's strategic resource allocation. Every moment spent pretending to know something you don't is a moment not spent learning something you could.
The not-knowing advantage
When you're genuinely comfortable with not knowing:
You ask better questions. Instead of asking questions designed to make you look smart, you ask questions designed to make you actually smart.
You attract better information. People share more openly with someone who admits gaps than someone who pretends to have none.
You make faster progress. You skip the performance and go straight to the learning.
You build real credibility. Nothing signals competence like knowing the boundaries of your competence.
The admission that unlocks everything
The phrase that changes everything isn't "I know" or "I think" or "In my experience."
It's: "I don't know. Help me understand."
This simple admission does three things simultaneously: it stops the pretense, starts the learning, and signals to others that you're someone worth teaching.
The person who says this in a meeting doesn't look incompetent—they look like someone who prioritizes truth over ego, results over appearance, growth over stagnation.
The knowing game
Here's what separates the truly capable from the merely confident: they've learned to be comfortable being wrong, uncertain, and incomplete.
They know that not knowing is temporary. Fake knowing is permanent.
The smartest thing you can do is admit what you don't know. The stupidest thing you can do is pretend that you do.
Thank you for reading,
Scott
Important Ideas
Personal development assumes you need improvement when what you really need is excavation. You're buried under decades of other people's expectations, opinions, and definitions of success. The goals you're chasing aren't even yours. They're inherited ambitions from people who programmed you before you knew you had a choice. Stop trying to become a better version of their creation and start remembering who you were before they got involved.
"I'll figure it out" isn't wishful thinking but pattern recognition. You've solved every major problem in your life so far or you wouldn't be here. Most people quit not because problems are unsolvable but because they've been trained to seek permission before persisting. The solution exists whether you believe it or not. Your belief only determines whether you'll be around when it reveals itself.
Your best ideas don't come from thinking harder but from thinking differently. Walking changes how your brain processes information because movement unlocks mental patterns that sitting blocks. The most successful people don't have better ideas sitting at desks. They have different ideas because they think in motion. Your breakthrough is waiting in the next thousand steps, not the next hour of forced focus.
The solution to money problems isn't budgeting better. It's earning more. Most people spend years perfecting the art of being broke with spreadsheets when that same energy could 10x their income. Your financial ceiling isn't determined by what you spend but by what you believe you're worth earning. Every hour spent cutting costs is an hour not spent becoming someone who doesn't need to cut costs.
Everyone studies viral content when they should study their own transformation. The specific way you solved your specific problem is intellectual property no competitor can copy. While others analyze trending posts for clues, your lived experience is sitting there unmonetized. The market doesn't need another commentary on someone else's success. It needs your map from where you were to where you are.
What People Are Saying
