There should be a word in the English language that slots in between learning and knowing.
I’ve been wanting to coin a phrase for the last while. To be one of those people who coins phrases. Tim Ferriss coined ‘Lifestyle Design’, Pat Riley coined ‘Three-peat’. This could be my chance.
People once said, ‘I know that the world is flat,’ or ‘I know that cigarettes are good for you.’ So how do we know what we know? It’s also not possible to know what we don’t.
So we need something to fill the void between learning and knowing.
My wife suggests ‘Temporary knowledge’ or ‘t-know’. That needs a lot of work. I suggested ‘temp-know’. But that needs just as much work. There should be a word for it though.
Confucius gets quoted enough. And although they’re wise, his proverbs don’t ever impact me much.
This one did. It’s a Confucius quote from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden:
To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.
And during his time living in a shack in the woods, which he built himself, with nothing but the basics, it seems Thoreau was also thinking about these types of things.
He spent day after day chopping down trees, cutting timber to sizes he needed so he could build his shack, and all the while during it, he sang these words to himself:
Men say they know many things,
But lo! they have taken wings–
The arts and the sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that any body knows.