An incredibly underrated but vastly powerful trait is the willingness to start reasoning toward an answer that you don’t already know, instead of just saying “I don’t know” as if that was the final word on the subject. You can learn via others teaching you, and you can learn by experience – but you can also learn by pure reason, and if you’re willing to at least give it a try, marvelous doors start to open up.
My son was talking about geometry, and so I figured I’d ask him a weird one and asked if he knew how many sides a septagon had. Here is his direct quote answer:
“I don’t, but it’s not 5, 6, or 8, because that’s a pentagon, a hexagon, and a[n] octagon. And ‘sept’ sounds like ‘seven,’ which is how I remember that ‘siete’ means seven. So I’m gonna guess seven.”
What a powerful brain! Such a mind can overcome any obstacle, simply because it believes that a path to the other side must exist. Being unwilling to take “I don’t know” as a satisfactory state of affairs, you can always begin to reason. You won’t be able to get all the way to every solution that way, but you’ll get much farther than you would otherwise, and you’ll almost always at least get to a point where you have an idea for a better question or more specific source of information to seek out.
Learn from Buddy!
The Opportunity Machine 