It is almost as if a cult has sprung up around the acquisition of knowledge, with the central creed being: Knowing More Things = More Certainty.

Unfortunately, as older and wiser folk among us can attest, the opposite tends to be true: Knowing More Things = Less Certainty, and learning is a process of removing certainty, not one of gaining it.

It is this Less Certainty that helps one appreciate just how little one knows, which, if you think about it, isn’t as paradoxical as it sounds.

The process of learning is, at its core, about assimilating knowledge acquired from different sources to execute actions or explain phenomena that occur in our lives. By definition, when we learn something new about a subject we are already familiar with, older knowledge is updated, corrected, or entirely replaced.

In other words, each time we “learn something new”, we simultaneously find out that we really don’t know a whole lot; i.e. the more we learn the less we know.

Take the example of gravity. Einstein’s General Theory Of Relativity did not just disprove Newtonian gravity, it also opened the doors to phenomena that scientists at that time did not know about, which have in ensuing decades, been proven to exist*.

In trading and investing, we need to appreciate that we know a lot less than we think we do. Accepting that our knowledge base is always going to change is an important step in realizing that most of the time, we simply do not know what will happen next.

And this is a good thing.

Not knowing is the best possible place to begin, as the mind is clear and open to learning new perspectives and discovering new ways of thinking and doing things.

After all, isn’t the best answer to being asked a question to which you don’t know the answer to in a job interview: “I don’t know, but I’ll find out”?

*If you are interested in this, google gravitational waves and/or black holes