The Power of Not Knowing

I listed to a BYU forum talk by Liz Wiseman called “The Power of Not Knowing” that I thought was really intriguing.   Among other things she said, “We need to recognize that we tend to do our best work when we are on the outer edges of what we know, when we are doing something hard and new, and when we are growing through challenge….  Let us gain knowledge, but let’s not get too big for our britches.  The best leaders are restless learners and perpetual rookies.  They realize that it is not what you know that counts, it is how fast you can learn.”  In other words, we should continually seek to challenge ourselves, and it is precisely when we do that we learn the best.  One of the points that she made was that when we don’t have all the answers and are forced to do things that are new and unfamiliar we often perform better than if we had come to the task with all the expertise we thought we needed.  It reminds me of what Elder Didier taught in a meeting I was a part of long ago: “The difference between activity and result is challenge,” meaning that if we want real results then we have to be challenged and pushed to our limits.  It is often when we are under the greatest pressure and uncertainty that we perform the best. 

                I think that this idea helps us to understand the way that God has put us here on the earth to learn.  He did the one thing that really causes us to be stretched: he took away our knowledge of the pre-mortal existence.  It would seem that we could make choices so much better if we had a perfect memory of all that took place in our life with God before this.  But that would essential remove all challenge, all faith, all stretching from the mortal existence.  The “power of not knowing” is that it allows us to “walk by faith” and develop our capacity much quicker (2 Corinthians 5:7).  The Lord declared, “We will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them” (Abraham 3:25).  If we had a perfect knowledge of who God was and what it was like to be with Him in the world before this one, I don’t think there would be much difficulty at all in following His commands here on earth.  But there would also be very little progress.  Just as muscles are only strengthened through resistance, so too must our spiritual capacities be grown through difficulty and faith and facing experiences that we aren’t sure that we can handle.  The power of not knowing comes to us as we do that which the writer of Proverbs invited us to do: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).  That’s where real strength is found.