Who Knows?

Have you ever met someone who seemed so overly confident in what they were saying, yet you had this nagging little voice in the back of your head saying, “What do they really know?"

As it turns out, there is a pretty simple system for figuring out how much someone really knows.

Aristotle famously wrote, "The more you know, the more you realize you don't know." So, ironically, our goal should be to NOT know as much as possible, because it’s the only way to continue growing our knowledge. Our awareness of what we don’t know expands exponentially as our knowledge about things grows. Interesting!

It was in doing some basic research on this topic of how knowledge increases our awareness of what we don’t know that I learned about The Dunning - Kruger effect, which is a theory that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability, and people with high ability at a task underestimate their own ability.?

As described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the bias results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability. Those without self-awareness, cannot objectively evaluate their level of competence. Those with a high level of self-awareness realize that there is so much that they don’t know that they will responsibly temper how they project the actual knowledge they do possess.?

So what does it mean and how do we extract out the value? Let’s get back to that overly confident know-it-all who seems to profess the answers to everything. You know that person who claims that he/she can show you how to win every listing, close every deal, or make millions of dollars, and all you have to do is buy or join his/her course, program, or office. That individual who says they know does not know. The person who wants to sell you the secrets to success truly does not have them. Proceed with caution.

The simplest way to find the people who DO have answers is to look for the people who work hard, have consistent results and admit that they don’t exactly have the answer to how they do what they do. The people who say they don’t know, are the ones who know!? By the way, I’ve tested this theory out.?

I talk to agents all the time, and it’s not unusual to meet high-performing agents who don’t know what makes them successful. These are agents who consistently do good at their jobs, and who have legions of loyal, long-term, customers and, oftentimes, friends. When you ask them how they built their businesses, they say they have no idea. Sometimes they say it’s just luck. These agents who say they don’t know, are the ones who are in the know. That is, they do not proclaim that they have the Holy Playbook of Success. Agents like this don’t focus on their own success. They focus on how to gain more knowledge to do more business. They are so aware that there is a lot that they do not know, that their headspace is occupied in finding new knowledge, not tallying up what they already know. These are the people who know. These are the people you can learn from. It will take persistence and asking very specific questions of them, but you can extract so much knowledge from those who say they don’t know.

Your growth as an agent and as a human requires you to concentrate on what you don’t know. As your knowledge grows, so too will the realization of what you don’t know as Aristotle pointed out. Mine the secrets from those who have gone before you, those who have mined their entire lives for knowledge. Finding those people is not easy, in that they won’t waive a flag telling you they know, but finding them is also not that hard, because you will know you found someone who knows when they admit that they don’t know.

These are my observations about people who are in the know. But naturally, I must question myself. Who knows?