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I spend about 40% of my life pretending to understand things.

Someone explains a complex tax code or how a combustion engine works, and I nod like I’m watching a TED Talk called “Yes, I Too Have a Brain.” I am a professional Nod Guy. People could be describing how to disarm a bomb or bake a soufflé and I’d be like, “Totally. Love this. So true.”

But here’s the secret behind every confident nod.

Certainty is just confusion that gave up.

It’s what happens when your brain hits the spinning wheel and goes, “Nope. I hate this part. I’m going to pretend the page loaded.”

Because confusion feels like incompetence. It feels like weakness. It feels like you’re the kid in class who forgot how to read out loud.

But confusion is often the opposite.

Confusion is your brain actually working.

This week, we’re diving into why the most confused person in the room might actually be the smartest one there, and why the people who seem “most certain” are often just the people who got tired of using their brain first.

Let’s get dumb.

We’ve built a world that hates loading screens.

We want clarity now. We want answers now. We want a tutorial before we’ve even touched the controller. We want an expert to tell us what to think so we can skip the part where thinking happens.

But UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork discovered something quietly evil and extremely helpful.

He called it desirable difficulties.

The idea is simple and rude.

When learning feels smooth, you aren’t learning. You’re performing learning.

You’re like someone at the gym doing bicep curls with two soup cans saying, “Wow, I’m shredded.”

Real learning looks worse. It feels worse.

It’s slower, messier, more frustrating, and you spend a lot of it thinking, “Wait. What?”

That “Wait. What?” is the weight.

That’s the moment your brain has to strain.

That’s when it starts laying down new wiring instead of just running the same old program.

Here’s a way to tell if you’re actually learning something.

If you don’t feel even mildly stupid at some point, you’re probably just rehearsing what you already know.

And we love rehearsal because it gives us that delicious feeling of being smart.

But growth doesn’t happen in rehearsal.

Growth happens in resistance.

The logic: If it feels easy, you’re usually staying on the surface.

The resistance: Confusion is like the burn in your muscles. It’s the signal you’re doing the thing that changes you.

The proof: There’s research showing that being forced to grapple with conflicting information can improve learning outcomes compared to being fed clean, simple instructions.

In other words, the student who is confused might be the one whose brain is actually lifting the weight.

And if you aren’t struggling, you’re just sitting on the mental couch eating Doritos made of certainty.

About 2,400 years ago, the Oracle at Delphi called Socrates the wisest man in Athens.

Which is basically the ancient version of winning “Most Likely to Start a Philosophy Podcast” in high school.

Socrates’ reaction was not “Finally, the recognition I deserve.”

His reaction was, “That can’t be right. I’m confused.”

So he did the most dangerous thing you can do in any era.

He started asking questions.

He interviewed the “experts” of his day, the TED Talkers in togas, the guys who were absolutely certain about everything and spoke like they had bullet points in their brains.

And what Socrates found was terrifying.

They weren’t wise. They were just… confident.

They had answers for everything, but their answers didn’t hold up under gentle questioning. Their certainty was a performance.

Socrates realized his only advantage wasn’t intelligence.

It was honesty.

He was willing to say, “I don’t know.”

Which is still considered a radical act today.

The Athenians eventually executed him for this, which is honestly the most relatable part of the story.

People hate when you make them feel their certainty wobble.

And this isn’t just ancient philosophy or academic psychology.

It shows up in business too.

Jeff Bezos has this idea that if you wait until you have 90% of the information, you’re too late.

Good decisions often get made with about 70% of what you wish you knew.

Which means if you’re waiting until you feel fully clear, fully ready, fully certain, you’re not being responsible.

You’re being slow.

You’re treating discomfort like a stop sign instead of a speed bump.

You have to bake a little confusion into your process.

Because uncertainty is not the exception.

It’s the environment.

And the people who build things for a living are the people who learned how to move while their brains are still buffering.

(NESH-uhns)

It’s a fancy, old-school word for total ignorance.

But while ignorance sounds like an insult, nescience is more like a condition.

It’s your brain before it gets filled with “best practices,” “industry standards,” and the loudest person on LinkedIn.

It’s the clean slate.

And if you want to solve a problem like a genius, you often have to return to nescience on purpose.

You have to be dumb enough to ask questions that feel embarrassing.

You have to look at a plane and say, “Wait, why doesn’t this just fall down?”

You have to look at your job and say, “Wait, why do we do it this way?”

You have to look at your own life and say, “Wait, is this actually working?”

Try using it in a sentence.

“Actually, I’m approaching this quarterly budget from a place of deep nescience.”

Translation: I have no clue where the money went, but I’m willing to stop nodding and start seeing.

This week, I want you to lean into the fog.

Your mission is to say “I don’t know” three times.

Full stop. No excuses. No “let me check.” No “I used to know this.” No little confidence scarf wrapped around it.

Just clean uncertainty.

Do it three times.

In a meeting.

To a friend or family member.

To yourself, out loud, about a certainty you’ve been faking.

Here’s what I predict will happen.

The room won’t explode.

You won’t spontaneously combust.

Nobody will call the cops and report a rare sighting of a human being with self-awareness.

You’ll just finally be the one paying attention.

Because the moment you stop pretending to know is the moment you start actually learning.

And that is the whole dumb point.