“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows”

This quote from Epictetus tells us that if you are too sure of your knowledge of something, you will not open your mind up to learn about it. To learn, you have to be open to the possibility that you do not know all there is on a topic.

It is important to have a modicum of humility about all things one does in life. Be confident in your abilities, sure, but do not think that because you are clever or have figured things out, that your way is the best, or only, way.

If you think that you already know a topic, then you are more likely to reject advice on the subject because you think you already have the way of doing things down. Even if you accept advice, if you think you are already an expert, you will have something in the back of your mind pulling your attention away from the advice, to the way of doing things the way you already “know”

Usually, learning comes when you are taught something in a way that makes something click in your mind. When you do not have a lot of knowledge about a subject, it is much easier for advice to click in your mind. When you think you already know the topic, the advice seems more like an alternative suggestion than something that teaches you something new.

This doesn’t mean that when you are learning about how to do something that you already have some knowledge about, you have to wipe out everything you have learned about the topic.

It just means that you need to make sure that you have opened your mind up to being taught to do something as a new and helpful way of doing something, not just an alternative.

We have varying degrees of knowledge about many different topics. But to increase our different bases of knowledge, we need to let others teach us, and not assume we already know all there is to know.