“I KNOW!”

“Erik, stop running to the corner away from the basketball. Run to the ball!”

“I KNOW!”

“You don’t know otherwise you wouldn’t do it!”

I didn’t know.

After each 9th grade basketball game, my dad would tell me what I could improve on. He’s been coaching for 20+ years, and playing sports his whole life. I was 14 years old and still learning about life.

I thought I knew.

I didn’t.

In this post, I’m going to talk about why having a growth mindset is essential for personal growth and improvement.

Adopting an I Don’t Know Mindset for Personal Growth

I’m a smart guy. This isn’t me bragging, this is a fact.

I can pick new topics and skills up quickly, I received A’s in school, and am able to connect with others on many different levels. I have 2 math degrees, am a reader of hundreds of books, and someone who is always looking to grow and improve my situation through what I’m learning on a daily basis.

I spend hours each week learning new things and apply them in my daily life.

Yet all of what I just mentioned doesn’t matter.

I’m self-aware. In particular, I’m self-aware that I know very little.

That’s right.

In the grand scheme of things, I don’t know much about anything.

That’s why I push to have what I call an “I don’t know mindset” (also called a growth mindset) in life and to live without ego towards my ideas and thoughts.

Dr. Carol Dweck, a pioneer in growth mindset research, defines it as “the understanding that abilities and intelligence can be developed.” Basically, the knowledge that even if you don’t know everything (none of us do, of course), you can always learn more and continue to develop and cultivate skills and knowledge!

“The only thing I know is that I know nothing, and I am no quite sure that I know that.” – Socrates

The Dunning-Kruger Effect and Perceived Knowledge

There are so many things I do not know. As humans, we tend to overestimate what we think we know.

There are two concepts I want to share with you now to illustrate my point.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is shown in the chart below:

When starting out in a new field, we start to learn a little bit and become very confident in our ability to perform. Think about when you first started learning math. What was the first thing that was taught? Counting! 1, 2, 3, 4…

We were confident because we could count, but then came addition. Then came subtraction, and then came word problems and all the other mumbo jumbo math stuff I don’t want to talk about here.

As we learned more, it became more difficult, and we became more weary of our ability to perform.

As our level of experience grew, we tend to be less confident in our abilities.

Many of us stay at the initial level because we feel confident where we are in our knowledge.

There are so many people in America who think they are experts on what’s going on in Washington DC, or in the C-Suite at their company, and yet don’t have political science degrees, MBAs, etc. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect at work.

As You Start to Know More, You Realize You Know Less

What’s interesting to me is that as you learn more in a subject, you realize you actually don’t know anything in the subject. In addition, you realize how much more there is to know and find out.

We go from “I know nothing” to “I’m an expert” to “I know nothing” as our actual level of knowledge increases!