You’d think that the more you learn, the more everything becomes clear. Yet, it often feels that things go in the opposite direction.
You find that every question you answer brings several new ones. Each extra bit of information leaves you feeling less confident in how comprehensive your overall understanding is. And so on.
This isn’t an illusion. It’s a real thing. And a good thing.
Picture your knowledge on a topic as a sphere. Everything inside the sphere is what you know — and everything outside is what’s unknown to you.
From inside, though, you can’t make contact with all the things you don’t know yet. Just the ones that sit immediately across the sphere’s boundary.
When you increase your understanding, your sphere of knowledge gets bigger. But so does its surface area. This is what Richard Feynman called the “expanding frontier of ignorance”.
The more you learn, the more this exposes you to new things you don’t know… yet. And the more you develop a skill the more this exposes you to new things you can’t do… yet.
That’s ok. In fact, it’s more than ok — it’s a beautiful thing. You just have to choose to see it that way rather than view it as a problem or frustration.
Embrace the fact that every door you close causes several new ones to open.