The Theory of Positive Ignorance

Positive ignorance is bliss, especially in business.

For most of my life I was the opposite of a risk-taker. At school and university I was the kid saving every coin of his allowance for groceries or sweets, never aiming to win, only ever trying to minimize losses. Everything I did pointed to the safe side. Risk nothing.

It made sense at the time. I was a refugee in another country, and we were poor. My allowance sometimes didn’t go up by even half a dollar. My father was stuck somewhere else, my mother was working, and the budget was for food, pleasures didn’t even register as a category. That kind of life builds a very conservative person.

And I wasn’t stupid. I was a good calculator. So the second I saw a loss coming, I cut it, without ever weighing the probability of that loss, or the size of the upside on the other side. I just ran.

That’s exactly wrong. That’s the mentality that walks you straight into a nine-to-five.

What changed me were two people. Neither was “smart” the way engineers mean it, they weren’t good at math or physics. But they had something I didn’t: positive ignorance. They didn’t know how to do the thing, and they were completely sure they’d figure it out anyway.

The first time I saw it, my instinct was: that’s not smart. But here’s what I learned. When you take on deals and problems from a place of positive ignorance, you become an optimist, and optimism is rare currency in business. When everything is falling apart in your startup, you never run short on it. It also shrinks big problems down to a size you’ll actually attack. (That part is dangerous if you can’t calculate, you’ll miscalculate everything. But if you can calculate, positive ignorance is a gift.)

It pushes you to take the big bet. To say: almost anything can be done, and if someone else did it, why can’t I? Like Steve Jobs said, everything around you was built by people no smarter than you. So even when the thing is new and you’re ignorant about it, you attack it with optimism. Knowledge plus optimism is what produces the real outcomes.

The way I square it now is simple: it’s a call option. Limited downside, unlimited upside. The downside is fixed, some wasted time, some resources, a set amount of your own effort. You know exactly what you’re paying. But the upside is open. And when the upside is that big, you have to accept the uncertainty to reach it.

Because almost everything new came from uncertainty and ignorance. Nothing genuinely new ever came from what we already knew, by definition. That’s the law of new things.

So build the engineering mind: calculate, attack, solve. But build the positive ignorance right next to it. One without the other leaves you stuck. Together, they let you buy the call, and the call is where everything new lives.

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