20. The More You Know, The More You Don't

An adult human brain can store upto 2.5 Petabytes of data. That is 2500 1TB hard drives. Everyday it gets loaded with about 34 Gigabytes of data. Staggering isn’t it! look it up - it’s true.

But even with so much information loaded everyday, let me ask you a question - did you know ?

Cows kill more humans every year than sharks do.

May be some of you actually did know that. But there is so much more that you (and I and everyone around us) does not know. And not just these random bits of information - but also areas of our supposed expertise are sometimes totally unknown to us.

It is not about the capacity of our brain but limitation of our curiosity, time and the sheer vastness of information that is around us now. Just for comparison Wikipedia has more than 50 million pages, even if you read 1 per minute it would take you 100 years.

Everytime I learn a new technology or a skill - I am amazed by how much I don’t know, not just in that area, but overall. It is such a humbling experience.

Recognizing the enormity of the information around us and the fact that we don’t know most of it is the best way to pique our interest into learning more. Heck (for better or for worse) we don’t even know the true nature of the people who are most dear to us.

So that brings us to the quote we started this post with. And this comes from one of the founding fathers of United States.

Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United states and as with most early presidents of the US, was a multi faceted individual. He was an avid book reader and collector with thousands of books in his personal library. When you put that into perspective, his quote - He who knows the best knows how little he knows - gets a whole different scale.

Now for the usual - the picture attached to this blog - what did you notice at the first glance ? Evening sky with a tree and a quote plastered across the image?

But just before the quote on the left hand corner, did you notice a plane being part of the scene ? Check it out

The more you know about everything … there’s more there to find ….

And before I let you go let’s clear the air around whole cow and sharks killing thing

On an average cows kill an average of 22 humans every year. Sharks kill about 5. But 100 million sharks are killed by humans every year - 20 million for every human killed. Shocking but true.

Keep searching, knowing and getting better everyday !

Thank you for reading through!

-Nikhil