A few days ago I was on Facebook and I saw an article about a guy who managed to get successful. In the description of the article I saw the word "video games", so I got curious and clicked on the article.
To my disappointment, there was nothing interesting about video games in there. However, the entire article was focused on one topic that was approached too many times when it comes to "how to get successful" - meditation.
Basically, the author talked about how he (or another person) was in a vacation at some point in the past, went on his balcony one day and had like 10 minutes of complete silence, time he spent without thinking about anything.
After that, he started meditating, change his life, blah blah blah. I'm sure it's interesting for the people who didn't hear this kind of story before, but for those of us who spent a lot of time reading those type of articles online, we're accustomed to hearing how all kind of people change their life after starting to meditate.
We know those type of articles. We read them before. To be honest, we read so many articles in the past that we already know what some of them will contain before even reading half of what the author wrote.
But something a lot of people don't think about is how important is to focus not on what we know, not on what we don't know, but on what we don't even know that we don't know.
It sounds a little weird, but hear me out. Around two weeks ago I wrote an article telling people to relearn even the simple things, because there's a chance that we do simple things the wrong way simply because that's the way we've been taught to do them.
In the article I gave as an example using a q-tip to clean your years, or using a deodorant. I explained why q-tips are bad and why deodorants should be used at night, after showering, not in the morning before going to work.
That kind of information may come as a surprise for some people. What's more interesting is that those who didn't know about what I just said above, had no idea about the way things worked. They assumed that q-tips are good and that deodorant should be used before leaving the house. They didn't know that they got it wrong. They took the information for granted, as being good. Those people never even imagined they could be wrong. They didn't know that they didn't know.
And that's something we should focus on from time to time.
Knowing that you have no idea how to code is one thing. Maybe one day you'll force yourself to learn how to write code and you'll become good at it. Not knowing that using a programming language can help you automate tasks, and right now you're wasting time focusing on tedious activities that could be done by a machine, means you're wasting time because of something you have no idea you don't know about.
It's tricky to think about it, but starting to learn about the things you don't even know exist, things you don't know you don't know about, is extremely important. It opens a lot of doors for you and it makes you look at work and life in a completely different way. All you have to do is find out more about all kind of things that exist, things that could change the way you do things now, things you never even thought were real.
Try to spend more time finding things you don't even know exists, skills you have no idea you can use to improve your life, things you don't know anything about. One small piece of information you randomly find, or a new skill that you learn, may completely change the way you do things and the rewards you receive for your work.