I asked a wildly successful entrepreneur to describe the most important thing he had learned about starting and building businesses. He didn’t mention the usual suspects. Great partners. Great teams. Great ideas. Access to capital. Work ethic, determination, and grit. Nope. Here’s what he feels is the most important lesson he has learned:
“That starting a successful business – much less running a successful business – is something you can ‘figure out.’ That all you need to do to succeed is find the right model, or framework, or system. That you can predict the future: How technology will change, how tastes will change, and how you will change.
Shoot, that you can somehow predict the future, even though that’s what all of us try to do. The most important thing I’ve learned is to always keep one thing in mind: “That I will never truly know.”
Admittedly, that approach sounds falsely humble; after all, experience is the best teacher, especially when success is the result. Yet experience – and education, both formal and informal – can sometimes make you “too smart” to question your decisions. A 2018 study showed that people with high college entrance exam scores tend to be much less likely to analyse and learn from their mistakes. The same can be true for physicians.
A 2005 Journal of Internal Medicine study showed that doctors who were given challenging clinical scenarios were only able to come up with a correct diagnosis two-thirds of the time. But when the same physicians were asked to analyse their initial diagnosis and consider alternative possibilities – in short, to imagine that they didn’t truly know – their diagnostic accuracy improved by as much as 40 percent.
Or take Jeff Bezos. As Bezos says, a key indicator of high intelligence is a willingness to change your mind – which, by extension, shows a willingness to admit you didn’t “know” what you thought you knew.
“The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding,” Bezos says, “reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.”
In short, they wake up every morning thinking, “I don’t know,” set out to figure out what they don’t know… and then do it all again tomorrow: allowing new data, new results, new trends, new anything revise and reshape the way they think.
While starting each day thinking, “I don’t know,” could sound paralysing, it’s not. In fact, it can be empowering. That’s at least partly why Bezos doesn’t spend a lot of time weighing the pros and cons of easily reversible decisions; since he can’t truly know, he focuses on making the best decision he can with the information currently available and leaves himself open to re-assessing, re-evaluating, and even reversing that decision.
That’s at least partly why Steve Jobs said knowing when to trust yourself can make a tremendous difference in your life; while you may not be able to predict whether a decision, strategy, or approach will work, you can know that you will work hard to overcome the inevitable obstacles and challenges inherent in any worthwhile pursuit.
That’s at least partly why Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman says, “I’m willing to change my mind every five minutes when I find that there’s information that I didn’t have, no matter how strong the stand I took was, or how aggressive or even rude I was about that point. If I find that I was wrong, I’ll change my mind immediately.”
Not knowing doesn’t mean not making decisions, though. One of the most important things any leader or entrepreneur does is make decisions – lots of them. The key is to remember that every decision simply marks a moment in time: a moment when you applied the model you decided you should apply, predicted what you felt confident you could predict, and felt you “knew” what you could know.
In those moments you did your best, which is all you can ever do. The key is to wake up the next day and remind yourself that, no matter how confident or certain you felt, you still don’t truly know. That way you’ll stay open to new data, new advice, new models, new predictions, and new knowledge.
Getting it wrong? Unfortunately, that’s part of the process. But staying wrong doesn’t have to be.