I had a sudden and terrifying revelation last month and I’ve spent the last few weeks trembling with a new fear of ignorance. It’s not that I mind being ignorant. I don’t. I like learning. When I don’t know something I ask, or learn, or read or watch a video about it. What scares me is that I just realized how much I don’t know that I don’t know about! If you’ve ever started a new hobby or job and learned that some little thing you assumed was no big deal could kill you - you’ll understand. I was watching “World’s Dirtiest Jobs” and saw that the host was not allowed to wear a “safety belt” when working on the inside of some dam turbine. Safer to fall 50 feet in the water and be fished out than to dangle by a safety harness the guy said. Odd, I thought. So I looked it up. Yep. Hanging from a safety harness CAN kill you - in as little as 5 to 15 minutes. Who knew? So, deer hunters, construction workers, people who wear these harnesses (and I was one at one time) can die? How did I not know I didn’t know that? It never occurred to me to ask - can a safety harness kill me? So now I’m on this kick about how do we learn what we don’t know we don’t know? Answer: Ask lots of questions and never assume anything.

I spent about 15 minutes last week watching a guy jump start his truck. It made me about five minutes late for an appointment. I told my friend why I was late and she said, “I thought you knew how to jump start a car. You’ve done it dozens of times.”

I nodded.

“I have, but he was putting the negative cable on a nut, not an engine part. I thought you had to put the negative cable to an unpainted piece of metal, but he’s a mechanic and he said that a clean nut is the same thing as unpainted metal, so I wanted to watch and see if it really worked. It did!”

“I thought you were supposed to connect the positive cable to the positive cable and the negative cable to the negative cable on the battery!” she said.

“Only if you want to risk blowing up the battery,” I said. “If the battery won’t start any other way, then the negative post to post will work, but only as a last resort.”

“I didn’t know that! All these years I’ve been doing it wrong!” she said.

At that instant I knew why we were good friends - she was willing to take in new information. She was open to learning - like me. Friends like her are hard to find. More and more I’m seeing just the opposite.

In any good martial arts wisdom movie you’ll see what I’m talking about - it’s the “full cup, empty cup” wisdom - “You can’t put tea (or coffee) into a cup that’s already full.” You have to empty the cup for new wisdom to flow into it. People don’t know there are things they don’t know they don’t know. Some even assume if they don’t know it, it’s not worth knowing!

Most people like to hold onto that full cup of what they do know. They think they know it all. They really do. I’ve had a week full of people who are convinced that after doing something three or four times they “know it all.” The truth is, they don’t even know what they don’t know. But who am I to tell them?

Wisdom for the day - it’s not what you don’t know that will hurt you. At least that you know to look out for. It’s not knowing what you don’t know you don’t know that will hurt you. So keep an open mind and a closed mouth. Listen. Learn. If you already know it- great. Someone just re-enforced your knowledge. But if you listen and watch chances are 9 times out of 10 you’ll learn something new - and it might just be the thing that you didn’t know you didn’t know that will save your life.