We’ve all been there before. The start line. The newbie. Kindergarten. The new hire. It can be overwhelming and at times downright scary. Not sure what to do or even how to do it. We are painfully aware that we don’t know what we don’t know.
In his book “Leadership 101” John C Maxwell says that one of the keys to mastering anything is self-directed learning. He goes on to define the learning process as starting with the realization that we don’t know what we don’t know.
To do this requires a lot of humility. I would go as far as to say many people, faced with learning something new, give up quickly when they realize they aren’t that good at it initially. Think about examples of this from your own life. What are some things that you have become proficient at that when you first started, you were downright bad?
I once took up the sport of sailing. I was in my early forties when I made the decision to purchase a sailboat. The guy who mentored me in this endeavor encouraged me to come out and race around the buoys with the local yacht club. I showed up for the very first time, excited about the idea of competition, and was the first boat across the start line when the horn sounded. Unfortunately, I was going the wrong direction which explained why I was first.
When something like that happens, you quickly realize that you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s easy to laugh at that now, but not so much in the moment. So having humility is a real key when you are starting out at something new.
Another key to success in the early stage is being curious. Anything that you want to become good at, you should be interested in. Interest should lead to curiosity about how things work. At this stage, there are no dumb questions. I started hanging around with people who had been sailing for a long time. I asked lots of questions. I also bought books and researched websites about sailing. I even signed up to take hands-on training courses.
Being curious and seeking knowledge helps you get to the second stage that Maxwell refers to as knowing what you don’t know. You begin to figure out what the essentials and basics are. Then you focus your educational and learning efforts on getting the answers to the “known” questions.
The next key idea is that you can’t just learn it from a book. You must get out and do it. And it needs to be massive action early on. I spent as much time on the water as I could those first few years. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, but I would not have learned how to avoid things going wrong had I not been engaged and actively putting in the work.
Being on the water is where skills are honed and confidence is gained. Life, like sailing, is never a finite set of variables. Every day on the water poses new challenges and new scenarios. On the water is where knowledge gets converted into wisdom.
In addition to humility, curiosity, and putting in the work, there is one more thing needed. You need to be confident in your ability to grow. If someone else can do it, you can to. It’s a myth that people who excel in a particular practice are “naturally born”. Trust that if you put in the effort, the results will come. Sometimes the learning curve is flat for longer than we wish, however.
So where do you find yourself as you read this post? What are you starting? What is it that you are trying to learn to be good at? Be sure to give yourself some grace and cultivate some patience. Set realistic expectations. Understand that we all start at the point where we don’t know what we don’t know.