My Ignorance Is My Main Professional Strength

Or, more precisely, my awareness of my ignorance.

I recently discovered during my digital wanderings a remarkable sentence from American actor and humorist Will Rogers: “Everybody is ignorant – only on different subjects.”

This sentence should be inscribed in gold letters on the facade of most corporations’ headquarters. The pretension of many employees – and managers – to exceed the limits of their knowledge is indeed one of the endemic problems that hinders or prevents a healthy working relationship.

This pretension often arises from an inability or deliberate refusal to trust their colleagues. As a result, these people rely on their own expertise, even when it is clearly irrelevant.

Moreover, by doing or monitoring the work of their colleagues, they divert a lot of attention from their own tasks. At the end of the day, this attitude generates a huge inefficiency.

This is why I claim in the somewhat provocative title of this article that ignorance is my main professional strength. The person who is aware of their own limits doesn’t pollute the work of their colleagues and disorganize the execution their own missions.