Editor’s note: Eric Jackson’s column appears on Tuesday.The deadline for this column is here and I do not have the slightest idea what to say.
This is not a good thing for a columnist.
But the deadline is still here and so today I have no choice but to write about not knowing.
Probably briefly.
I doubt I am alone in strongly resisting “not knowing” as an answer.
Not knowing is a dangerous thing. To admit to the customer waiting for your expertise, or to your board, your subordinate, or your boss that you have nothing to say, that you don’t know the answer, that you can’t solve the problem is both hard and risky.
And perhaps the hardest and riskiest thing is to admit it to ourselves.
And so we find an answer, force it before we really have to.
And in doing so, perhaps, we lose an opportunity, an opportunity to find new answers and new directions.
For, when you don’t know, you open yourself up to learning.
When you don’t know, you may find that someone else does, perhaps someone you’d never have otherwise suspected.
When you don’t know, you may not take the step that precludes the possibility that only comes with waiting, openly.
When you don’t know, you are forced to remain humble, opening up sources of wisdom around you that might otherwise remain hidden behind your ego.
When you don’t know, you may even become better able to hear your own intuition.
And in any case, when you don’t know, at the very least you can practice the habit of honesty, a soil that is fertile for many things.
Here’s hoping for some of all that to come my way in this next week.
Ideas? Suggestions? Contact Eric at eric@deepweave.com
Eric Jackson is the founder of DeepWeave. He has built his career pioneering software solutions to particularly large and difficult problems. In 2000, Eric co-founded Ibrix, Inc. He is the inventor of the Ibrix distributed file system, a parallel file storage system able to scale in size and performance to millions of terabytes.
