Ignorance is Bliss !!!

I have always maintained that the secret of success in any field is knowledge and so I tend to equip myself with information of any and every kind. I try to be as informed as possible on myriad topics ranging from technology to the paranormal.

Some of my friends appreciate my ‘bank’ of information and come to be for advice on various topics. I too enjoy helping those whom I can. However, of late I have realised that a lot of information actually leads to a lot of misery and more confusion than you can handle.

We have a tendency of being 'the devils advocate' with the information that we have. We inevitably use it to limit our progress. Some of the most successful innovators, scientists and entrepreneurs were not ‘educated’ so they were to naive to know the hurdles that they would face in their path to sucess and so they never worried about these hurdles - they just plunged right in!

Even when I started my business a decade ago, I was just 18 and did not know anything that a modern management graduate does (I had only completed junior college then). All I knew is that I had a great idea which could translate into a great business. So I just got off with it. A friend tried to dissuade me saying the model won’t work, it only made my resolve stronger to succeed.No wonder the business succeeded and I learnt things about the business while staying in the business and not outside of it.

If I have to restart my business now, I won’t be able to do it the same way as I did in 2000. The overload of information will not allow me to 'plunge right in'.

I would do a thousand feasibility analyses and use the various models that my MBA taught me.All this while knowing fully that none of these models and analyses would guarantee 100 % success. We use them only to put things in perspective so as to get more information about the chances of failure, Such analysis are rarely about actual solutions to our problems.

Years of formal education and knowledge has limited our thinking and imagination into an inflexible mould. There is no scope of intuition and spontaneity, risk-taking is not on the basis of gut-feeling; and out of the box thinking is left out completely.