Want To Get to the Top? Start Saying These 3 Magic Words

We all want to get to the top. Getting to the top is a long and arduous process. It requires patience, skill and the will to learn. It requires facing the fact that you are not perfect — for me this was (and still is) the hardest part. Facing up to the fact that our egos can stand in our way and that things take time is tough.

Tougher still is changing our mindset and realizing that what we’ve been taught in school is mostly either useless or wrong. We are taught that we must have all the answers, and that to do well, we must memorize a lot of rote knowledge, in order to regurgitate it, when the time comes to take the test.

That’s not how the world works.

That’s not how life works.

Life is complex, highly fluid, subject to constantly changing variables and impossible to lock down. This is why Darwin said that “ It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

Most adaptable.

Not the fittest.

But the most adaptable.

That’s who survives the longest.

Now, humans are pretty adoptable and we can do incredible things with our minds and bodies when we apply ourselves to a given task.

But as with everything — there are limits.

Recognize your limits

We all have limits — and it is in recognizing these limits and acknowledging that we are not perfect, that there is power.

Tremendous power.

To make progress we must recognize our limits.

Recognize our fallibility.

Recognize the fact that we are not perfect.

This is incredibly hard though, because our ego gets in the way, and tries to convince us that we’re perfect.

Convince us of the fact, that we already know it all, and even if we don’t that we should act as if we do.

And this is where the train comes off the rails for most of us. Think about it for a minute. Even if we don’t know something, we should act as if we do.

This statement is true for most of us. It certainly is for me. The most recent example I can think of came over Christmas, when my father-in-law asked me to explain how Bitcoin and Blockchain worked.

I have a very vague idea of these two concepts work.

Very vague.

Instead of just admitting that I couldn’t explain what was going on, I immediately leaped into a very long and detailed explanation, using a lot of advanced terms like brute-forcing.

I don’t really know what brute-forcing means, but I pretended to, because that’s what I’ve been taught in school.

I’ve been taught that bullshit pays.

If I’m doing a presentation and I don’t know the answer to something I’ll talk and talk and talk until I’ve persuaded the other party that I know enough that he should reward me with a decent grade.

One thing is persuasion and another is real life. If you want to convince others that you know you can bullshit all you want. But you can’t fake your way to personal growth.

If you want to become successful — if you want to become a master of a given subject, you’re going to need a different strategy.

This strategy is based on three simple words, which form a simple sentence, that we don’t say nearly enough.

The Power-Packed Punchline

The three magic words that you need to start saying are this:

I don’t know.

That’s it.

I don’t know.

It has power.

It is liberating.

It frees you from the expectation that you have to know everything.

You don’t.

You can’t.

And you don’t have to.

Saying I don’t know to yourself allows you to learn. It allows you to find your weak spots, and allows you to figure out areas where you need to improve.

If you say it to others you might think you come off as weak.

You don’t.

Instead you come off as strong, because you allow yourself to be vulnerable. The first time I said it in front of my boss I felt like I was being stabbed in my gut.

You know that sinking feeling you get, when you tell someone something terrible?

That’s how I felt.

I thought that I’d messed up by saying it.

I hadn’t.

Instead I was encouraged to figure it out for myself and learn and become better.

At the same time it was liberating.

And exhilarating.

And it taught me the power of saying I don’t know.

The more I say it, the more I learn. Saying I don’t know is a key to improving, and to overcome obstacles. Or to use Obstacles as the Way to quote one of my favorite writers Ryan Holiday.

The point is this.

In order to grow as a person, get better at your craft and get closer to mastery and success, you must embrace the fact that there are things you don’t know.

In fact there are probably an endless amount of things you don’t know, and the only way to become better is to embrace it.

Start saying I don’t know and watch the magic unfold before your eyes.