Coming from a place of not knowing

Reading Jeff Bezos letter to his employees announcing his decision to step down as CEO, I was caught by his last sentences “Remember to wander. Let curiosity be your compass.”

We are all born with a sense of curiosity and wander. My kids can sometimes drive me crazy with their constant questions about everything. They are passionate to discover the world and its different angles, without taking what they might already know for granted. They believe there is more to explore and learn. They are motivated by the unknown. Unfortunately, as we grow older the majority of us stops questioning. We feel more comfortable in our safety zone, following the status quo and what we are familiar with. What is more we are embarrassed to show we don’t know something and we tend to take things for granted. I don’t blame us though. This is how our society works. Usually we are not rewarded for being curious. Instead, we are rewarded for knowing and being right. There is even a negative connotation around curiosity. “Curiosity killed the cat”, says the idiom.

In fact, we believe our opinions shape who we are. We tend to support our point of view so strongly up to the point we get frustrated for not convincing the other person that we are right.

I invite you, next time your friend or your colleague provides a suggestion you think is crazy, impossible to happen or even wrong in your point of view, to just step back for a minute and ask yourself: “what is he seeing, that I don’t see?”, “what if it could work?” “How can I think about the matter differently?” The biggest creativity comes when we come from a place of not knowing.

As Donald Rumsfeld said in 2002, “ There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

If we embrace curiosity and allow ourselves to listen from a place of not knowing, neuroscience has shown that we learn more and create more.