Should you abandon your Wisdom?

Imagine yourself in a boat, standing on the shores. You are all set to start a new journey into the oceans. If you sat there, the boat wouldn't move. You need to push it harder into the water first. Once it is in the water, you start rowing the boat. You put in some effort, but it is less difficult compared to pushing the boat from land to water. After a while, when you are at some reasonable distance from the shore, the boat gains its speed from your efforts and from the winds. Soon it gains a decent speed. Once you are in the mid seas, things may get crazy. The waves, the winds from different directions try to reduce your speed. You notice that you aren't able to move even faster than you thought before. You start to struggle. Giving effort here in the mid-seas makes no sense.

The 21st century is a boom for knowledge seekers. We have so much information and knowledge, it's a blast ! We are in the vast seas of knowledge and we don't know what to consume and what not to consume. As we see ourselves in the vast sea of knowledge, we gain a lot of wisdom, which is good. Yet, reaching beyond a certain point, we don't gain a step change in our wisdom. We're now meandering in the middle of the sea.

What are we expected to do now? Just pull this trigger and ask yourself "What do I don't know?". The idea of knowing feels great, we can explain how things are working in the world, we can predict the things to happen in an expected way. This gives us a sense of security or a sense of confidence, but it can be strenuous or fragile. When we encounter the opposing ideas, beliefs and concepts we tend to stay away to protect our own ideas. We want more people to back up our ideas and needs to feel safe. that's our thinking.

While developing a strong reliance on our knowledge, we tend to develop a fixed way of thinking. We tend to cling on to our ideas, our concepts, our people, our places . If we ask yourself "Do we know enough?" and listen to your little voice you will hear a 'No'. None of us know enough, but we all know at least something from where the ego kicks in. You in fact know only a small piece of the big puzzle. Why then pretend knowing it all and squander our precious time doing things blocking our creative spirits. We all are creative beings, but we know how to block that quite well, that's what knowing does to us. If instead we abandon our hard earned wisdom and become comfortable of not knowing, we actually open up many possibilities. The 'Not Knowing' is in-fact a great power. 'Not knowing' actually exposes our black zones in our knowledge. 'Not knowing' opens up newer opportunities, helps us to meet newer heights that we may scale.

Getting wisdom is hard, but abandoning it.. Is even harder.

How to Abandon Wisdom?

Here are the top three ways to start with, you can get creative and add some of your own.

★ Visiting Places: Experiencing yourself at different places. Visit places that have different weather conditions. Visit places that have different landscapes(seas, desert or mountains). Visit places having different cultures or different work ethics. Visit places where people are speaking different sounding languages. Places do expose 'What we don't know?'. Places are a great way to discover what you haven't seen or heard.

★ Talking to Strangers: Talking to random people we don't know quite well, looks scary, but it isn't that scary. Reading books helps us to gain knowledge, but talking to strangers is even better. Strangers do expose 'What we don't know?'. All human beings have something different to share. Like the qualities of discipline, professionalism, work ethics, passion. Learning from the lives of other people helps us to gain the 'other' perspectives. Your understanding with people becomes even better, which is priceless.

★ Scramble yourself: We like our profession and hobbies so much. We tend to become specialists in a domain or a sport/activity by following the same profession. The idea here is to expose yourself to newer hobbies. Like scuba diving, bungee jumping or chess if you haven't tried those before. Learn from other specialists. Read Law books if you happen to be a math geek. Try to paint if you happen to be a business entrepreneur. You don't attempt to master those, but have a taste of all those. You have a single life and you should get the flavors of other profession/specialization. Don't merely become a specialist. Later, you may never know how you would mix and match those to create your own niche which you would offer to the world.

Once you are in the mid seas, you don't need to sail anymore. You are in an effortless zone of creativity, you are comfortable in 'Not Knowing'. Allow that creativity to come out and devise solutions and make the world even better.