Category: Certainty

When Are Limits Beneficial?

We tend to perceive limits as fundamentally bad. But is that necessarily the case? Can limitations be good for us?

There is a natural sense that the more options we have, the better. Limitations are… well, limiting. They keep us from getting the exact thing that we want.

However, in some cases our brains can be confronted with information overload. Given a choice of two or three items — for instance, jars of pasta sauce at the grocery store — we can settle on one fairly easily. Maybe we look at the price, or the ingredients, or one is a family favorite, or whatever.

However, that choice becomes much more difficult when there are a hundred options. Comparing a hundred prices, or a hundred lists of ingredients is much more daunting.

We see this with the internet. Someone opening up a web browser has a virtually unlimited number of websites they could visit. Perhaps you want to check out some news. Or play a game, or watch some cat videos, or learn a foreign language, or talk with someone halfway around the world. All of these, and much, much more, are available at the click of a mouse or a swipe of a finger.

How do you decide what to do? It can feel completely overwhelming.

It turns out that limiting your choices can actually be good in many cases. Narrowing your choices reduces cognitive load, or the amount of brain energy needed to make decisions. A sub-optimal decision made quickly and decisively, may be preferable to a slightly better option made later on.

Can you think of ways that limits can be beneficial?

Related questions: How do you limit yourself? How much is enough? When is it useful to fail? Too much or too little?

What Are The Advantages Of Saying ‘I Don’t Know’?

Many people don’t like to admit that they don’t know something. However, there are advantages to saying the words ‘I don’t know’. What are they?

Knowing things is very useful. In fact, much of our society has been built around people knowing things. Engineers build bridges because they understand how materials behave. We have remarkably accurate warnings regarding extreme weather events because meteorologists understand how weather patterns evolve. And so on.

If knowing things is powerful, then the obvious corollary is that not knowing things displays weakness. Or so it might seem.

Indeed, we often behave as though that were the case. People often go through life projecting an air of certainty that, at times, might make it difficult to disagree or argue with them.

Naturally, this is a problem if they don’t actually know what they claim to know. That can be potentially embarrassing for them, or problematic or even dangerous for those around them.

So there is a time and a place for revealing your ignorance. After all, you only are ignorant until you learn, and learning often starts with the phrase ‘I don’t know’.

There are some things that are essentially unknowable. We can predict the future, but those predictions are just as likely to be wrong as they are to be right. Events happen all the time that catch experts off guard. Some examples include stock market crashes, sports upsets, medical diagnoses, and surprising political elections.

If you know something, it is important to state clearly that you are in possession of the facts. However, it can be just as important that when you don’t know, you say so just as clearly.

Can you think of benefits of saying ‘I don’t know’?

Related questions: When was the last time you said ‘I don’t know’? Know or don’t know? How do you deal with uncertainty?