Do you feel well known or unknown?

"To live is the rarest thing in the world, Most of the people just exist" -Oscar Wilde. Life is the biggest "unknown unknown" to be discovered. One needs to extract life out of his existence. So live like its your "final day", live like "heaven out on earth" and you end up feeling like having discovered the most mysterious unknown existing on the Earth.

Well, to the people that know me well, I'm well known. The people that have never met or spoke to me I'm unknown. There are people in between that have heard of me through mutual friends but don't know me. I guess to them I'm known of. Considering there are plenty more people in the world that have met or even heard about me, overall I'm unknown and I'm okay with that. If the unknown is known it's no more unknown. if it's unknown it's hard to be known.

Ben Franklin unlocked the secret to getting other people to like you. Most of us have been conditioned to think that the way to get someone to like us is by doing nice little favors for them, thereby demonstrating that we are a thoughtful and dependable person. Old Benji thought differently. Franklin once had a very powerful political rival who was hellbent on making his life miserable. Franklin knew that it would be beneficial to have this man on his side, but instead of groveling for his approval, he took a counter-intuitive approach. He knew his rival was in possession of a very rare and valuable book, and simply asked him to borrow it. After a few days, he returned it with a thank you note and, surprisingly, his rival became his friend.

What Franklin tapped into is a well-known psychological principle known as cognitive dissonance. Basically, cognitive dissonance is the tension that results from having two contradictory beliefs in our mind at the same time. This stress is uncomfortable, so we automatically alter one of our beliefs to conform with the other to resolve this conflict. In the case of Franklin, his rival held the belief: “I do not like Benjamin Franklin.” Upon doing him the favor, however, he was forced to come to terms with another belief: “It’s a pain in the ass to do favors for other people, so I only do favors for people I like.” These two beliefs are in conflict, and since he cannot un-loan the book, he was forced to soften and eventually reverse his ill-will towards Franklin. The secret of the Benjamin Franklin effect is this: If you want people to like you, ask them to do favors for you.

You won't discover it until it becomes a problem for you, at which point it will become a known unknown. You can try to anticipate every possible problem you could have, but some will just be entirely unexpected. Here's an example of a known unknown: how long does it take before a human's muscles begin to atrophy in zero gravity? We were pretty sure it would happen, but didn't know how quickly. Here's an unknown unknown: bone loss in space. Nobody had any idea that bones actually need gravity to remain strong. That one turned out to be quite a shock when we discovered it. We started trying to find out more about it immediately, of course.

Human beings are encountering with three areas of knowledge. If the entire universal knowledge about anything and everything is considered as one full circle i.e. 100% for total knowledge then : 1. How much percentage of knowledge you know that you know?: say 1-2% 2. How much percentage of knowledge you know that you don't know?: say 5-10% 3. How much percentage of knowledge you don't know that you don't know?: The entire balance of 100 - (total% indicated against 1 and 2 above) which could range anywhere between 90-94% right? This is the dark area of which even a small percentage is possible to be explored by any individual, a new expanded horizon of life gets opened up to the person to live with a totally different approach, in a highly positive perspective and creative outlook for happy living. Cheers!