Jerry Garcia once said, “You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t wanna know.” It sounds like something you’d hear in a parking lot before a Grateful Dead show, and maybe it was. But the more I think about it, the more it strikes me as one of the truest things anyone has said about learning. Information is everywhere. Teachers, mentors, data, and feedback are all around us. None of it does any good if we close the door on it.
I see this play out in my practice all the time. A client comes in certain they have a slam-dunk case, and when I start walking through the weak spots and risks, I watch them stop listening. They hear the parts that support their position and tune out the rest. The problem is that the judge, the jury, or opposing counsel won’t tune it out. Attorneys are not immune either. I have known lawyers who refused to learn new technology, brushed off feedback from a partner, or assumed the way they handled a matter twenty years ago still works today. In every case, the knowledge they needed was right in front of them. They simply didn’t want it.
Business owners face the same temptation, and the stakes are just as high. It might be the monthly financials that keep getting pushed to the bottom of the pile because the cash flow picture is ugly. It might be a pattern of customer complaints written off as a few cranky people, or a competitor quietly taking market share while leadership insists nothing has changed. I’ve had more than one conversation with an owner who, looking back at a failed deal or a situation that went sideways, admitted the warning signs were there. Willful blindness feels comfortable in the moment. Over time it becomes expensive, and sometimes it costs you the business.
The good news is that wanting to know is a choice, and it’s one you can make today. Start by being honest with yourself about what you’ve been avoiding, the conversation you keep putting off, or the report you haven’t opened. Ask the people around you what you might be missing, and then resist the urge to argue when they answer. Uncomfortable truths are rarely fun to hear, but they are almost always useful. So what is it that you don’t wanna know right now, and what might you learn if you let yourself find out? As Garcia sang, “Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”
