Early in my career, I was working with someone more junior and reacted with visible surprise when they didn’t know something I considered basic. I don’t remember the exact topic, but I remember their response: “Did you know this at my stage?”
That question stopped me. Because the honest answer was no. I didn’t. I’d learned it at some point along the way, and at some point after that I’d forgotten that I ever had to learn it. It had just become background knowledge, and I’d unconsciously started treating it as something everyone should already have.
The further you get from the beginning of your own learning, the easier it is to lose patience with people who are still in it.
That moment exposed something I’ve watched play out everywhere since. The further you get from the beginning of your own learning, the easier it is to lose patience with people who are still in it. You forget how much of what you know came from stumbling through things, asking questions that felt obvious in hindsight, and having people around who gave you room to figure it out.
The instinct to react with “you don’t know that?” or “how could you not know this already?” shows up fast, especially when you’re stressed or under pressure. I’ve done it. Most people have. But every time it happens, it makes the other person less likely to ask the next question. And the question they don’t ask is usually the one that would have prevented a problem down the road.
Beyond work
It’s easy to frame this as a workplace thing, and it is. Teams where people are afraid to admit what they don’t know are teams that move slower than they think they are, because everyone’s spending energy performing competence instead of actually building it. But it’s bigger than work. The assumption that someone is stupid or lesser because they don’t know something you know is just a bad way to move through the world. Everyone is at a different point in their own trajectory. The things that are obvious to you weren’t always obvious to you, and the things that are obvious to them might not be obvious to you either.
The best working relationships I’ve had were with people who made it safe to say “I don’t know.” Not in some corporate psychological safety initiative way. Just in the way where you could be honest about where your knowledge stopped and nobody made you feel small for it.
I think about that question a lot. “Did you know this at my stage?” It’s a good one to keep in your back pocket, not to ask someone else, but to ask yourself when you feel that flash of impatience coming on.