How little I know

Amazing how time flies.

It's been a year and two weeks since I began a new chapter in my life. I had just said goodbye to my job and I was going to take a few months off before starting a volunteer placement with Engineers without Borders Canada. During those months off, I wanted to travel around North America on a 'learning tour' to seek out new ideas and ways of thinking.

So exactly a year ago, my brother and I were sitting in a classroom in Columbia university, attending a lecture on the global food supply chain by Raj Patel. It was very clear to me that I knew almost nothing about a system that plays such a huge role in my daily life.

A week later I was attending a workshop in Rhode Island, where Andrew Hargadon's talk on "how breakthroughs happen" made me realize how little I knew about the way some of the most significant innovations of our time have emerged (Edison's light bulb or Ford's automobile).

That 'learning tour' was taken to a whole 'nother level since August '08, as I began my work in Malawi. A constant stream of new experiences over the past year have made me realize how little I know about the world we live in.

And that is a very uncomfortable feeling. From junior school all the way through university, I've been expected to understand, to figure things out, and come up with the 'right answer'. So for many months, this feeling of ignorance dissuaded me from sharing any thoughts online. "I can't write about something until I really understand it". Then just recently I came across this interview with Richard Saul Wurman (the founder of TED among many things) which helped me to get out of this rut.

"I had an epiphany at about twenty years of age, a true momentary epiphany. It had nothing to do with making things understandable for the world. It had to do with my own ignorance.
Everything comes from that terrifying moment, that milli-second, that terrifying moment of utter truth when I understood that I understood nothing.
I'll tell you the fundamental NEXT thing that happened in my life. I started teaching at the University of Carolina at twenty-six years of age, an assistant professor of architecture. The epiphany there occurred in the first day of class was: Do I teach about what I know or do I teach what I want to learn about?"

Working out here in the development sector in Malawi, I feel that it's my task to communicate 'lessons from the field' to friends and family back in Canada. But when I read that interview, it became clear to me that the reason I was finding this task so difficult, was because I was trying to write about what I know. And instead what I need to be doing is to share the observations and stories that make me go- "hmm, I had no idea". It's in that spirit that I hope to write this blog.