What do you know?

What I have for you today isn't so much a lesson as it is food for thought.

Most people think that the universe is divided into two categories when it comes to knowledge. First there are the things that we are aware of, which we call the things that we know. And then there are the things that we realize the existence of but about which we have little or no information about, which we call the things that we do not know. 

There is a third much larger category though. It contains all of the things that we do not know that we do not know. In truth, the entirety of the first two categories would fit inside but a single drop of what is the ocean of things that we do not know that we do not know.

It is very common to look around at your surroundings and after once becoming comfortable with them to believe that you know what there is to know about them. But this simply is not true. The more we learn and study our natural environment the more things we learn about. Our horizons expand as we include new information into our knowledge base and new things become possible for us.


The truth is these "new" things were always possible, we just did not know it. Our understanding of all the facts at hand is what limits what we can and can not do. Often when we learn something new, old theories and beliefs automatically become invalidated. Things that we "knew" beyond a shadow of a doubt were true turn out to be false.

It used to be a "fact" that the world was flat. We know now that the world is round. It used to be a fact that if you wanted a message to travel thousands of miles it would take weeks. We can now have a message travel the globe in mere seconds. It used to be a fact that the sun the moon and the stars all rotated around the earth. We know now that the earth is but a small part of a solar system that travels through a much larger galaxy.

Man has been on this planet and recording history for but a few thousand years. During that time our knowledge base has multiplied itself many times over. This happened very slowly at first. But as ways of sharing knowledge have become more and more rapid the increase has been at near geometric rates.

Yet, scientists believe that more than 99 percent of everything that we believe to be true is false. We simply have not learned enough about the universe to know what really is and what is not.

How arrogant the average person is in his belief that what he knows is a large fragment of what there is to know. If you were to take any man from any era and show him the wonders of life five hundred years in his future you would likely blow his mind, with all of the "impossible" things that are just part of everyday living.

So, I challenge you. Set some time a side, a few minutes, maybe half an hour. Think about all the things you know. Think about all the things you don't know. Then do your very best to imagine looking into that ocean of things that you do not know you do not know. Think of all the things that might be if the first two categories of knowledge were expanded, if you knew more and were more aware of the things you know you do not know. In your mind's eye see if you can shift some of the things from that third category into the other two.

If you can believe it...

You can do it.  In 1954 an Englishman, named Roger Bannister did something that had never been recorded before. He ran a mile in just under four minutes. The interesting thing about this is before that, in the 1940's, scientists and doctors had reams of statistics showing that due to the physics of motion and the general make-up of the human body running the mile in under four minutes was a physical impossibility. Many people believed this with absolute certainty. And those people were right. Until they weren't.

For a great many years the four minute mile was an unobtainable goal. What changed? For the longest time the athletes themselves believed it could not be done. After all nobody they had ever heard of had been able to do it. Their trainers could not do it and did not know anybody that had. Medical science said it could not be done. But all successful athletes are constantly working to improve themselves, striving to be stronger, smarter and faster. They train with other athletes and learn new techniques for pacing and breathing. Their minds are always looking for what is next. They never get to the finish line and say okay that's it, that's the best I will ever be able to do, now i'm gonna take up fishing. Each time they meet a goal they are looking forward to the next one. And each time they prove to themselves that it is possible to be just a little better than the last time.

Regardless of what other people told them, it was only a matter of time before the athletes running the mile had enough focus and strength of purpose to start believing that a four minute mile was possible.  All that had to happen for that belief to become a reality is that the person accomplishing the goal had to have a stronger belief than the people telling him it could not be done.

Ultimately, the belief of someone that is actually in the process of accomplishing something is much stronger than the belief of someone sitting on the sidelines. A runner has more knowledge of what their body can do in a race than a doctor or scientist. What the runner has is practical knowledge, gained by doing. Everyone else just has statistical data based on what has been observed. In most cases what science tells us is possible or not is based on a generalization surrounding the "facts" about what has and has not been done.

We used to live in a world where the four minute mile was an impossibility. So was wireless communication. We used to know for a fact that such a thing as an airplane could not ever possibly exist. We used to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the world was flat and were prone to murdering or locking away people that had PROOF to the contrary.

Take a minute and imagine if you will telling someone a thousand years ago about how one day they would be able to get into their car and drive to the movie theater. And you could go on to tell them that one of their friends would be able to pull out their wireless phone and buy tickets for the movie, while another friend bought a ticket for a flight to Memphis that they were taking the next day.  It would probably take you twenty minutes to describe all the concepts contained in those two sentences. By the time you finished explaining all the simply ridiculous things that you were talking about, the person you were talking to would certainly be looking at you like you were a madman, an idiot or both.  You would be hitting them with thing after thing after thing that they know to be impossible. And in their world with their limitations, they would be right.

Until they weren't.