The Analects
Knowing what you know
The half that has to be said out loud
Analects 2.17 and 9.8
Read as modesty it is a platitude. Read as an instruction it is an operation that very few people can actually perform.
What actually happened?
He said it to Zilu, the hot-headed student who liked to look capable, and it is built as a pair: when you know a thing, hold that you know it; when you do not know a thing, allow that you do not know it. He held himself to the same rule. Asked something by a countryman, he said his own mind went perfectly blank, and that all he could do was take the question by its two extremes and knock them together until it was used up. He never supplied an answer he did not have.
Draw the line before you use the judgement
Bad calls rarely come from missing knowledge. They come from using an uncertain thing as if it were settled. Marking the line tells you which items can carry weight and which are guesses wearing the same clothes.
Users will probably like this, and we asked thirty people and twenty said they would use it, are not the same sentence.
Saying you don't know is the cheap option
The bill for bluffing arrives later, once other people have acted on it, and by then it has multiplied. The bill for saying you don't know is one moment of looking less impressive. The arithmetic runs the same direction every time.
He guessed at a number in a meeting. Three teams built schedules on it. Two weeks later the real figure arrived and all three rebuilt.
Empty, then knock the two ends together
Admitting ignorance has to be followed by something, or it is only a way of handing the problem back. His method was to squeeze in from both extremes, worst case and best case, and let the truth sit in the gap. You can start without an answer.
You don't know the size of this market. Work out the ceiling and the floor and operate in between. It beats picking a number.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: someone has asked you, to your face, about something you have no real footing on.
Ask first: is there one thing that actually happened standing behind the answer I am about to give?
Where it goes wrong: producing a confident judgement in order to look professional; or stopping at I don't know and offering no next step, which is not honesty, only a handoff.
Lines to keep
Knowing what you know and what you do not: that is knowledge.
I take hold of its two extremes and knock them together.
To have a fault and not mend it is the fault.
Same situation, other people are asking
By the time the data is in, will it be too late?Everyone I know is in this. I don't actually understand it.I keep listing reasons this will work. Should I do the other list?Everything I know about this came up one reporting line.I don't have enough information · all 12 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.