A meditation on uncertainty and open minds
The freedom that comes from saying, “I don't know yet.”
A few years ago…
When someone would ask my opinion on something I hadn’t thought through. Instead of saying, “I don’t know yet,” I’d construct a plausible-sounding response in real-time. Assemble fragments of related knowledge. Project confidence. Deliver it convincingly.
Most of the time, no one challenged it. Sometimes people even thanked me for the insight.
I knew I was performing knowledge I didn’t have. That performance was making me dumber, not smarter, because I was practicing the art of seeming certain rather than practicing the discipline of actual thinking.
The turning point came when someone asked me a complex question, I gave my confident, improvised answer, and they said, “That’s interesting. How did you arrive at that conclusion?”
I had no answer. Because I hadn’t arrived at any conclusion. I’d just manufactured a response to avoid saying, “I don’t know.”
That moment of exposure was humiliating and clarifying. I was so afraid of not knowing that I was sabotaging my learning.
It’s not the answer anyone wanted.
When we think about wisdom, we imagine having answers, knowing things, and being certain. The wise person, as an oracle, is asked a question and provides the answer.
We believe that admitting you don’t know something is admitting inadequacy. That uncertainty is weakness, and wisdom means having moved beyond it.
But watch what actually happens to people who always claim to know: they stop learning. They can’t learn because learning requires acknowledging that you don’t currently know something. If you’re performing constantly, you’ve cut yourself off from the primary condition for growth.
We romanticize the expert who always has answers. The consultant who never says, “I don’t know.” The leader who projects unwavering confidence. The intellectual who has opinions on everything.
But that’s not wisdom. That’s just certainty, which is often wisdom’s opposite.
This pattern appears everywhere, once you start looking.
The best doctors are comfortable saying, “I don’t know yet, but here’s how I’ll find out.” They’re not diminished by uncertainty; they’re energized by it. It means there’s something to learn.
The worst doctors always need to appear certain. They make confident diagnoses based on incomplete information because admitting uncertainty feels like professional failure. Every so often, those diagnoses are wrong in ways that harm patients.
The best researchers say “We don’t know” constantly. Their entire field is built on the foundation of not knowing and trying to find out.
The worst researchers either claim to know more than evidence supports, or they freeze in uncertainty, unable to make provisional claims that could be tested and refined.
The best teachers say, “That’s a great question; I don’t know the answer. Let’s figure it out together.” They model intellectual humility and curiosity.
The worst teachers cannot admit ignorance in front of students. They invent answers, shut down questions they can’t answer, or punish curiosity that reveals the limits of their knowledge. We all had teachers like those.
“I don’t know yet” contains three powerful words.
”I”: personal ownership. Not “nobody knows” or “it’s unknowable.” I, specifically, don’t know. That’s honest and specific.
“Don’t know”: admission of current state. Not permanent. Not shameful. But accurate.
“Yet”: the most important word. It transforms ignorance from a fixed state into a temporary condition. From “I’m the kind of person who doesn’t know this” to “I’m the kind of person who doesn’t know this yet but can learn.”
That “yet” opens a possibility. It positions not knowing as the beginning of learning, not the end of competence.
The freedom of not knowing is that it removes the burden of pretending.
When you perform knowledge you don’t have, you’re using cognitive resources to maintain your performance and remember what you claimed, avoiding exposure. Defending positions you don’t actually hold.
That’s exhausting and makes you rigid. You can’t change your mind because you’ve publicly committed to something you made up.
When you admit you don’t know, you’re free. You can ask questions without pretending you already know the answers. You can change your mind as you learn more. You can focus your energy on learning rather than managing your image.
“I don’t know” is different from “I can’t know.”
“I don’t know” is honest uncertainty coupled with openness to learning.
“I can’t know” or “nobody can know” is often intellectual laziness disguised as humility. It’s giving up on knowing while pretending that’s wise acceptance of limits.
Some things genuinely can’t be known. Many things people claim are unknowable are just difficult to figure out. “I don’t know” leaves room for the hard work of figuring out. “Nobody can know” forecloses it.
The wisdom of not knowing includes knowing what you need to know.
Random ignorance isn’t wisdom. Not knowing things you need to know for your work or life isn’t freedom; it’s negligence.
The wisdom is in:
Knowing what you don’t know (awareness of your ignorance)
Knowing what you have to know (prioritization)
Knowing how to find out what you don’t know (learning strategies)
Being comfortable admitting what you don’t know (intellectual humility)
Organizations punish “I don’t know” and reward false certainty.
In most professional environments, saying “I don’t know” feels dangerous. It can be interpreted as incompetence. People who project confidence get promoted. People who admit uncertainty get sidelined.
This creates terrible incentives. Everyone performs certainty. Decisions get made based on confidently delivered wrong information rather than a humble admission of uncertainty.
The organizations that thrive are the ones that create psychological safety around not knowing. Where “I don’t know, let’s find out” is rewarded more than “Here’s my confident guess presented as fact.”
That’s rare. Which means practicing the wisdom of not knowing often requires going against cultural pressure.
The paradox: experts often know less than they think they do.
The more you know about a domain, the more you realize how much you don’t know. True expertise includes awareness of complexity, edge cases, and areas of ongoing debate.
But expertise also brings confidence, which can calcify into certainty. The expert stops saying “I don’t know” because they’re accustomed to being the person who knows.
The wisest experts maintain a beginner’s mind even in domains of expertise. They remain curious about what they don’t know, even as they deepen what they do know.
When you genuinely don’t know something, you’re more likely to:
Ask good questions
Listen carefully to the answers
Consider multiple perspectives
Update your understanding based on new information
Think creatively rather than defaulting to what you already know
Certainty is generative of nothing. You already know, so why inquire further?
Not knowing is the condition for all curiosity, all learning, and all growth. When you lose your comfort with not knowing, you lose your capacity to become wiser.
The experienced thinker is comfortable with vast regions of not knowing. They’ve learned that admitting ignorance doesn’t diminish them; it positions them to learn.
When you catch yourself manufacturing answers to avoid admitting uncertainty, stop.
What would happen if you just said, “I don’t know yet”? What question could you ask instead of performing knowledge? What could you learn if you weren’t busy defending a position you just invented?
Are you prioritizing appearing smart over actually becoming smarter? Are you protecting your ego at the cost of your growth?
The wisdom isn’t in always knowing. It’s in being honest about what you don’t know and curious about finding out.
Everything else is just pretending, which might protect your image but guarantees you’ll stay exactly as wise as you are right now.