How To Know What You Don’t Know

How is that….to know what you don’t know?

This weird question mark will be bent out in a moment.

Personally, I was a victim 1 ½ years ago, and thanks to a strange way, I was caught by the fascinated and, in a certain sense, “unreal” digital marketing world.

Even if digital commerce has already taken gigantic steps towards a new and real future, there is still a passive fence for most people to accept this reality.

Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, to just mention a few of them, are not only real companies but also businesses with multi-billion-dollar revenues.

Everything in life needs a certain “starting strip” to capture everything around you, especially when something so big and important as a new way of interacting is introduced in all areas with an accelerated speed.

Important phases in our history of development started with the agricultural revolution, continued with the Industrial Revolution, and now we are all facing the Digital Revolution.

The sad part of this rapid evolution is that people who ignore the need for us all to be “digitalized” will definitely be left behind.

As commerce is a huge part of all societies, digital commerce will probably be the segment that will have the most important impact.

To Know, To Not Know and To Not Know That You Don’t Know

How is that? ….and why is it important?

Well, the problem with not knowing what you should know is that you can lose the opportunity of your life.

But it doesn’t stop there. There is an even worse scenario:

To think that you know what you, in reality, don’t know. This was exactly what happened to me 1 ½ years ago.

As humans, we belong to any of the following groups when it comes to knowledge:

To know what you know

For example, I know my name, I know the address where I live, etc.

To know what you don´t know

An example here could be, I know that I don’t know Japanese. I know that for sure.

To not know what you don’t know

belonging to this group makes life quite uncomplicated. You have nothing to worry about but neither anything to be happy about, because you don´t know what to be happy for or what to worry about.

So far, so good, but we need to add a 4th group or a sub-group to the second or maybe 3rd group above, and that is:

Believe that you know what you don’t know—this means that you believe in something that isn’t correct. This group is the main cause of our failures in life.

Since some years back, I have been searching for freedom in life, which I believe is a dream we all have. I was tired of the corporate world, working for others and trading my experience and knowledge for money.

When surfing the Internet, I encountered these digital business opportunities with increasing intensity every single day, some more spectacular than others. For me, they were all scams with false promises of getting rich without any effort other than paying the money they asked for.

Watch the following video, a Q&A video answering the three most frequent questions about digital marketing online. The answers are very transparent and mixed with my personal experience.

Spending Money Is An Issue Of Knowing

While thinking about the different groups and dividing our actions based on what you know and don’t, you can start to analyze how you are spending money.

Besides the fixed budgeted costs you need to seriously manage to avoid financial problems, we all have a certain amount of money to spend more emotionally or spontaneously. It could be a drink in a bar, nice pants, or shoes you just saw in a shop. In this way, we can spend hundreds of dollars, and we feel comfortable about it.

What drives that kind of behavior?

Knowledge about what you want. You know for sure that you want what you are purchasing and are not fumbling around in unknown territory.

On the other side, we can feel completely unsure and even reluctant to spend $5, maybe $20 or $30. What drives this behavior is the lack of knowledge. You don’t know what you are buying and feel that it is a completely unnecessary purchase.

This happened to me when I saw all online opportunities as scams, where somebody tried to “steal” my money. The money was not an issue. It was my totally cold attitude towards the product, based on my perception, that held me back from spending the $29.95.

I was a victim of the “Believe that you know what you don’t know” syndrome.

Don’t let anybody or anything take away your dream of freedom.