[mmaunder]

Asking questions and knowing what you don't know and being honest about it is super important. But so is moving forward, getting things done and leadership and sometimes constantly questioning your world with fresh eyes every morning can mess with these things. It's also exhausting.

I find folks who have been surrounded by extremely smart hands-on analytical types most of their lives are slow moving and not great leaders because they question absolutely everything. It's a reflex that develops because if you're working with 20 other engineers building a rocket you don't want to be the guy who said "lets just assume" or "screw it, lets just get it out the door".

Sometimes though, it's useful to have an arrogant ass around that makes a few assumptions and keeps kicking the can down the road. Steve Jobs comes to mind.

[lightcatcher]

I completely agree with this sentiment. I think this blog post mostly described the characteristics of a skeptic, and many "smart" people are skeptics. However, I don't necessarily correlate skeptics with getting lots of things done, like Steve Jobs did.

Ideally, there is some balance between making assumptions and asking questions that leads to great leadership and innovation. I think this balance occurs when one questions everything within a certain domain they wish to control (for instance, Apple and how people interact with computers), but then just accepts the common views for topics outside of their domain.

[itmag]

The people who get things done in this world are often, but not always, cocksure bastards who never second-guess themselves. They may live their entire lives in epistemological error but they don't give a rat's ass since they succeed at laying wenches, closing sales, advancing up the corpolitical greasepole, etc. Hell, they don't even actively not-care about the truth. The thought that they may be wrong doesn't even enter their minds in the first place. They are at philosophical unconscious incompetence. They just don't care.

We can learn from this. Smart people should be winning! at life, after all. Maybe a combo of strategical luminosity and tactical cocksurity can be found? :)

As a matter of fact, this struggle to avoid the extremes of reckless delusion on one hand and self-sabotage on the other, is one of my major life motifs.