The knowledge gap

You do not know what you do not know. You are ignorant about your ignorance and that makes you even more ignorant. We face this dilemma everyday as knowledge workers. When you are faced with a big problem that you do not know much about, what do you do? There are usually mountains of information that you have to sift through. You need to make intelligent judgments about you really need to know and what to skip. And when you know something you have to make sure that you use your newly acquired knowledge to solve your problems and improve yourself. If you are an engineer, your value is equal to your ability to apply what you know. Executing based on your knowledge is truly the ultimate form of performance in any field.

But what do you do about what you do not know and there is no simple way to find out what you do not know? NOTHING. If you do not know about it, why bother yourself with it. You will come to know about what you do not know if you need it later. And if you don't end up needing it, you will never find out what you never knew in the first place.