I Don’t Know

My friend Richard Feynman said, “I don’t know.” I heard him say it several times. He said it just like Harold, the mentally handicapped dishwasher I worked with when I was a young man making minimum wage at Famous Bill’s Restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

“I don’t know” is not an apology. There’s no shame. It’s a simple statement of fact. When Richard Feynman didn’t know, he often worked harder than anyone else to find out, but while he didn’t know, he said, “I don’t know.”

– Penn Jillette

Ego has a nasty way interfering with our best interests. Where it might serve us much better to simply say “I don’t know”, sometimes we provide an answer we think we’ve heard or read somewhere, without any real understanding or knowledge of its truth. Worse, once we provide that answer, we usually try to defend it, even it it’s plainly wrong. This makes us look stupid, or at least petty, but worse still, this means we skip over Feynman’s second step and never endeavor to find out the truth, lest we strike one more blow to the ego.

Honesty: one of the simplest ways to keep ego in check.