One of the principles that I learned growing up was to “Know What I Don’t Know.’ I have tried to follow this precept, consciously or not, since a young age. And the fundamental driving force is truth or from another point of view, reality.

Knowing what you don’t know is something that one should become aware of as early in life as possible. In some ways, I think it is something that is born within us. When you don’t know something, read a book or nowadays, Google it. But it is something that needs to be maintained and nurtured lest the ways of the world corrupt that innate sense and one loses touch with reality in a way.

Part of knowing what you don’t know is learning where your world ends — at least the limits of what your five senses are telling you — and the rest of the world begins. It’s an understanding of how big and complex the world is and how small we are within it. It’s an understanding that the world does not revolve around us. Rather, we are an equal player — and partner — in the world around us.

Over time, we may come to know a lot of things and be able to guess what other things are based upon the limited information that we have at hand. But even then, it is important to know what is a guess — and how much a far fetched guess it is — and what is a learned fact. Lead with the learned facts and use the guesses to the extent that the risk of being wrong is too high.