It’s okay to say ‘I don’t know’.
The sum of everything that you don’t know by far outweighs the sum of everything you do know.
I blame the schools; kids are now brought up to be terrified of being wrong and hesitant to ask questions of their elders. The very institutions that are set up promote growth seem to be doing their best to stifle it.
Admissions that you just don’t know the answer often go hand in hand with a reluctance to rethink your errors and examine other possibilities.
It is a problem that bedevils all specialist fields including the martial arts.
Confession time.
On a personal level, I find that although I have been writing online articles and blog posts on martial arts themes for many years (currently 90 on Substack and 113 on Wordpress,) my ideas and opinions are changing all the time.
As an example; the early articles I wrote about jujutsu and Wado karate I have had to rewrite and update three times; the earlier ones loaded with over-simplification and naïve assumptions. I am not embarrassed about these first attempts, they are just evidence of my changing ideas as I gain access to more knowledge in the relevant fields.
Therein lies the danger of published articles on the Internet; too often you can be judged by your earlier work.
Examples from history.
It’s interesting to look at it from this angle.
As someone who has an interest in Art history I would sometimes come across references to artists who experienced some kind of existential crisis and proceeded to make a bonfire of all their earlier paintings – their juvenilia up in smoke. Initially, it was beyond my comprehension that anyone would think of doing such a thing, but when I thought it through I realised that there was a certain logic in such a dramatic act.
All creatives are on a journey, why would they waste their time dwelling on work created in their younger more naïve years? They have moved on.
In the same vein; after Miles Davis had created probably the single most iconic jazz album, ‘Kind of Blue’ 1959, he had no desire to play any of the music ever again. In an interview, he said, “…I have no feel for it anymore – it’s more like warmed-over turkey”.
With martial artists depth of understanding increases and techniques mature.
Pitfalls and cures.
Your understanding changes, and so it should. For martial artists in particular, if you are serious about what you do, you have enough trials and tribulations ahead of you without becoming stuck. If that does happen, it usually comes from dogma or living in your own bubble. The antidotes to this malaise are curiosity and open-mindedness. However, being curious does not mean that you have to become some kind of martial arts butterfly, flitting from flower to flower, the risk from that is that your understanding and skills become a mixed-up mess, a jack of all trades master of none.
I read somewhere that a healthy approach to working with your own level of understanding is embodied in a simple question and answer between sensei and student.
When the sensei shows you something and asks you, “Do you understand?” the reply should be, “Yes, I understand, but only up to my current level of knowledge”. Because it’s obvious that you won’t understand it at the same level or sophistication that your sensei does.
Hardship and trying times.
The bottom line is that understanding should be evolving all the time. But learning curves are not always tidy. There are times when the curve seems to plateau or even dip. In those instances you just have to double-down and call upon your reserves.
Soldiering on often delivers some profound lightbulb moments. From my experience these can either be pieces of information that suddenly have significant positive implications, or something that just happens in your body which takes you by surprise and afterwards you find yourself wondering, ‘now where did that come from?’
How we handle these revelations is worth reflecting on; avoid over-thinking things, ensure that the information (or spark of insight) creates impetus to move forward; don’t suffer from ‘paralysis by analysis’, it’s a springboard, not a flat-footed landing or dead cat bounce.
And never, ever, ever feel smug in your knowledge, which neatly returns me to the original comment – it’s worth saying twice – ‘The sum of everything that you don’t know by far outweighs the sum of everything you do know’.
Header image: Tim Shaw via AI.
This reminded me of a couple of things. One was my favourite ever school report. To this day I don't know if it was meant as a compliment or a criticism, but I favour the former. My history master simply wrote
"Gillis appears to know practically nothing about practically everything".
The other quote this reminded me of was one often attributed to JM Keynes but was apparently another economist named Paul Samuelson. He once said
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
In this age of social informational overload, there seems to be an expectation for you to have a view and an opinion and to be dogmatic in your defence of it. We seem to have lost the humility to say "I don't know" or "I'm not sure" or "I know something about it but I want to explore further before I commit myself".
I have a couple of thoughts about this. The first is that, "I don't know," is a fantastic phrase that I wish more people would use. Many years ago I was in a meeting in a research center I worked at and one of the doctors was getting out of hand demanding answers to a problem. One of the leaders of the research center stopped everything dead in its tracks by flat out saying, "I don't know the answer to the problem." Instead of making a rod for his own back he admitted he didn't know and used that as a new point of departure for how to move forward instead of just making something up that might come back to bite him later.
My next thought is that martial arts school I used to call home was a bit of a cutthroat crucible. The expectation was that you should "steal" any technique you see. If you don't understand, ask questions until you have it within you grasp. I try to ask questions about techniques until I'm able to understand them. This may cause some headaches to some instructors and may be seen as somewhat "disruptive" to some classes, but I'm generally not a fan of being in classes where my curiosity and desire to learn is seen as disruptive. So people can just deal with me during sparring if that's how they feel. ;)