Ahh the early days! The crazy, lazy, brainless, illogical, hilarious early days!
While this might seem like a random transition, just go with it. Everyone raise your hands if you’ve heard the phrase Lefty Loosey / Righty Tighty? Please put your hands down. Now everyone raise your hands if you know the meaning of the phrase Lefty Loosey / Righty Tighty? Since I can’t see your hands, I’m going to go with the assumption that 50% of you didn’t raise your hands on the meaning of question. Hope, hope, hope that this digital, self-serving approach validates that others share in this, my one of many, knowledge gaps.
Now cut to a spring day at the barn. Early days. My son and I are busy expanding out some stall walls. To do this we first have to drill a one inch diameter hole, dead center, in the bottom of a 4×4 (A 4×4 is a 4 inch square post of varying lengths. In this case, 8 feet in length I shall now issue a correction – due to an edit by my sister Kim. A 4×4’s actual dimensions are 3.375 inch square and varying in length. Kim always got straight A’s in school so I tend to do what she tells me.)
If you’re curious please see the bottom of this post for a brief overview of our stall expansion process. It’s actually a pretty cool approach.
Okay, now back to the drilling.
We have the drill out. We have our largest drill bit set into the drill. I’d love to tell you that we were using a spade drill bit, but that would have put us way past our rudimentary knowledge. To learn more about various types of bits, please click on this link.
The drilling shall commence and drilling and drilling and drilling and drilling, without any sign of a hole appearing in the post. Perplexed, we stopped and looked at each other. “Man, this is hard wood.”, “Right?”. To which my son solemnly nodded. “Do you want to try it?”, I asked him. To which my son solemnly nodded again. As this was the first time either of us had ever actually held a drill, this was some serious business.
We could not believe that any wood could be so hard as to not allow us to drill a hole – especially considering the size of our drill bit and the seriousness of our efforts.
We tried again, first one of us, then the other. No hole appeared. We are now, no exaggeration, an hour into the process and still no hole. We pretty but we slow.
Sitting back on our heels we looked at each other and both of us said, simultaneously, Lefty Loosey, Righty Tighty? Notice the question mark. We honestly didn’t know the answer. But the seriousness left our faces and we both started to smile. Once we reversed the direction of the drill, a hole immediately appeared, at which point we both burst out laughing.
How seriously dumb can two people be? Were we dumb or were we ignorant?
Ignorance: Is a lack of knowledge or information.
Knowledge: Is defined as facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.
Everyone, depending on the subject matter, is both ignorant and intelligent. If we could only stop on this point there would be a lot less angst in the world, but there’s a thing called ego that comes into your world and wreaks havoc.
Ego: A person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance.
I profess that nothing can trip me up more than when my ego gets in the way. And the only one that is really paying attention to my ego is me. Everyone else is focused on protecting their own egos.
Really pretty silly. Think about the logic, or illogic in this case. We are intelligent human beings. However we cannot know all things so we are ignorant of some things. To learn something new we must gain knowledge and/or experience. In this way we go from ignorant to knowledgeable.
Sounds simple right?
Now add ego to the mix and so many of us, myself included, are hesitant to try anything new because we don’t want to appear ignorant. We should appear ignorant because we are ignorant. This is the starting position of anyone who is introduced to something new. Ignorance. If we could just remove our ego, embrace this natural state of ignorance, our world would be much more interesting a place.
And you know the secret that I’ve discovered, whenever I embrace my ignorance. The more I try something new the more my confidence grows and the more comfortable I become in being in a state of ignorance.
What’s my point? Be comfortable with the fact that you were not born all-knowing. All of us are ignorant of so many things. And, in order to learn new things you have to embrace the fact that new things start from a position of ignorance. Work hard to not confuse ignorance and intelligence. Focus on gaining knowledge.
Stall Expansion Overview
Now for a bit of irrelevant stall expansion context. Once have the above referenced hole drilled we would then place it on top of a spike – which we’ve already hammered into the ground. We’ve hammered a total of two spikes – on each side of the vertical – where we want the new (expanded) stall wall built. Once this is done we would then have the frame of the new stall wall. From there we finish building the new stall wall by attaching boards to each post. Not really the point of this story so consider this context. However please don’t hesitate to ping me if you would like more details of this stall wall / expansion project. It actually was a pretty neat trick. Pretty easy too, assuming you knew the meaning of lefty loosey, right tighty.