I Dunno

This may not be an original thought, but it's true none-the-less. It's not what you don't know that is the real problem, it is what you don't know that you don't know ,that will get you. For example, suppose you signed up for Merle's Academy of Flight and I said I could teach you to fly a 747 aircraft out of a book and without ever leaving my garage. After the exhaustive training course you could head off to try out your new skills. Not really knowing how to fly the plane won't hurt you because, as a sane person, you wouldn't try it. But because of my fine training, you don't know that you don't know how to fly the plane and so, you are headed for real problems. Here's another example, which may or may not clarify my point, but it is a funny story. I did not make this up. Several years ago a homeowner in our fair city, looked out her window and saw smoke coming out the front door of the house across the street. She called 9-1-1 to report a fire. The firemen, thinking that they knew there was a house fire, rushed to the scene to find smoke coming out of a locked wrought iron security door. While some of them cut a hole in the door, another group ascended their ladders and began to chop holes in the roof, searching for the source of the fire and pretty much shooting water everywhere. The homeowner, who was barbecuing in the back yard with a radio blasting, finally heard the commotion and rushed to the front door. The smoke evidently had drifted through the open doors and out the front. What the firemen didn't know that they didn't know, was that there was no real fire, even though there was a lot of smoke, and this caused a bunch of trouble. I bring this up because I run into people who don't know what they don't know all the time. Bosses are especially prone to this affliction. My boss is a nice enough guy, but he is so convinced that he is the world's foremost expert on *fill in subject here*, that he listens with his answer running. He is too busy forming his instant solution to the problem, to understand the question. He believes that he is the man behind the curtain with all the answers. I went to explain something to him today and because he didn't know that he didn't understand the problem, he gave me an answer that didn't really apply to the situation. Then he turned away to signal that I was dismissed. What I was trying to impress upon him was that he needed to focus on something before someone else helped him to focus. Later, someone with more credibility than me, and some juice in the chain-of-command, called him and via that call he began to grasp the nature of the beast. His solution was much better the second time around. He found out what he didn't know. The best part is that now he owns this problem, not me. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong and sometimes just full of it. Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor