Ignorance is Truly Bliss

When I was young, many kids believed that to make it in this world, you needed to start your own company and sell something. We had a youth program that encouraged young people to open businesses and start trading. There was no guidance on which businesses we could start, but there was a strong drive to encourage young people to become entrepreneurs. We all understood the basics of what was needed to start a business. Obviously, you needed to know what your business was going to be about and who would own and run it.

We all got stuck at the business plan part. I never fully understood what a business plan was, and to this day, I still do not have a clear grasp of it. This is where almost everyone stopped pursuing their business dreams. I am perplexed now, knowing that these are things people go to MBA programs to fully understand. If business plans are so complex, why were they touted as essential for starting a business?

The desire to have my own business did not die with this lack of business plan knowledge. I once figured out that kids around my neighbourhood loved a particular snack. I thought if I saved enough money, I could buy these potato chips and sell them. The plan was to use some of my lunch money to purchase the chips. Eventually, I made this a reality, and in no time, I managed to start my own small business, selling to kids in my neighbourhood. Zero business plan. Zero budgeting. Zero business structuring.

Sometimes, too much information can stop someone from starting something. Knowing everything that is required to succeed can paralyse a person. They might see the obstacles and decide it is too much and give up. There is a study on how presenting problems to students can predict which ones will solve difficult problems. If a group of students is told that a certain problem has stumped brilliant mathematicians for years, this can discourage some students from even trying to solve it. They might think, “If experts have struggled, what chance do I have?” Another group of students who aren’t given this information often fare better than the first group. Ignorance really can be bliss.

So, when is knowledge helpful, and when is it a hindrance? I think having knowledge is useful for routine tasks. If I am doing something I have done before, knowing more about how to do it can improve the experience. But when trying to be creative, experience can be a hindrance. People can spend more time finding reasons not to do something. Experience might make me focus on all the ways something could fail. Think of startups. When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak worked on their first project, they were not thinking about building a multi-trillion-dollar company. They saw a gap in the market for personal computers and tried to fill it. Imagine if they had thought, “People won’t want to use our computer because they’re only popular in corporations.” Would Jobs and Wozniak have been encouraged to continue working on the Apple 1?

They were driven by intuition and ignored all the red flags. A startup needs a certain level of ignorance to be creative; once it becomes mainstream, experience becomes important to maintain the idea.

The age of information has brought both benefits and drawbacks. We can now do things more efficiently than ever. Travel is easier—I can reach the other side of the world in less than a day, something that used to take months. I can communicate instantly with someone 1,000 kilometres away, something nearly impossible in the past. I can find books in seconds, listen to any music, and stream any movie instantly.

But we spend so much of our time-consuming content—meaningful and useless information alike. We know more about life and everything else than people did 100 years ago, yet we are less creative. There are no iPhone-level inventions these days. There is less risk-taking in movies or art. We now know what works, which has made art repetitive. Everyone colours within the lines instead of daring to be different. Music is bland, movies are either remakes or created as franchises, with ideas repeated until they are worn out.

We are lacking creativity because we know too much. We know what will not work, and we have became less daring.