“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, boy.”

“I know you mean well, but all you have is your word. So do what you say, and say what you mean.”

Those were lessons instilled in me as a child.

It’s hard work staying true to your word. It’s even harder sometimes to stay true to yourself.

Somewhere along the way, I made myself a promise: I would never give up my quest for knowledge and understanding.

I haven’t.

That doesn’t mean I’ve always kept the promise perfectly.

I read. I listen. I observe. I ask questions. I also spend time each day writing down my thoughts and questions. It keeps my mind fresh, but more importantly, it forces me to examine what I think I know.

Sometimes questions lead to answers. Sometimes they only lead to better questions. I’ve learned not to consider either outcome a failure.

In fact, I’ve learned there is just as much information in failure as there is in a positive result.

When something fails, I try to take a deep breath and examine what went wrong. What did I miss? Was the plan flawed? Did I make a bad assumption? Was there something I couldn’t have anticipated?

Failure doesn’t always hand you the answer.

Sometimes all it gives you is another question.

That’s enough.

A good question gives you somewhere to start.

I remember when I thought the goal was perfection. Everything had to be exactly right. If I learned enough, prepared enough, and planned carefully enough, perhaps I could account for every possibility.

Experience cured me of that.

While performing operations, I learned that sometimes the first plan goes to shit. When that happens, the shit just got real, and you’d better start figuring some things out.

That didn’t teach me to prepare less.

It changed the way I prepared.

I began leaving room for the unexpected. I learned that preparation wasn’t about controlling everything that might happen. It was about understanding enough to adapt when something happened that I hadn’t planned for.

And somewhere in there, I learned to apply a little grace.

Perfection is a construct of our own making. We decide what perfect should look like and sometimes punish ourselves when reality refuses to cooperate.

Grace doesn’t mean lowering my standards. I still believe in doing things well. It means accepting that something can go wrong without everything being wrong.

Sometimes the plan fails.

Take a deep breath. Examine what went wrong. Figure out what you know, what you don’t know, and where to start.

Then move forward.

We don’t just learn from books, lectures, or fancy speeches.

Some lessons come from places we would rather avoid.

We learn from pain. We learn from regret. We learn from loss.

Life is rarely tied up in a pretty bow. Understanding it means being open to the things that make us uncomfortable as well as the things that bring us joy. Pain doesn’t suddenly become good because we learned something from it. Loss doesn’t become fair because eventually we found some meaning in it.

Some things just hurt.

But they are still part of the education.

I used to say gas-station donuts are horrible so we can appreciate the good ones when we finally taste one.

There’s probably some questionable philosophy in there somewhere, but I still believe the basic idea.

Contrast teaches us something.

Joy means something different after sorrow. Success looks different after failure. Certainty feels different once you’ve discovered how spectacularly wrong you can be.

Maybe we need both sides of the experience to understand either one.

There is also a difference between knowing something and understanding it.

As a technician, I read countless manuals explaining how to repair things. Part A connects to Part C. Check this voltage. Replace that component. Follow the procedure.

That’s knowledge.

But you can’t really troubleshoot something until you understand how it operates. What does each part do? Why is it there? What is its function within the whole system? Once you understand that, a fault gives you somewhere to start looking.

And the fault isn’t always where the problem is.

I don’t know how many times I found a fault presenting itself in one location only to discover that the actual problem was somewhere else entirely.

I’ve learned that life can work that way too.

What we see isn’t necessarily where the problem began.

That’s why I’ve never been satisfied with simply knowing what happened. I want to understand how the pieces fit together. I want to know why.

That has required me to broaden my understanding of the world.

More importantly, I’ve had to let go of some of my illusions and assumptions.

That’s more difficult than it sounds.

We spend a lifetime learning from our experiences. Those experiences teach us how the world works—or at least how we believe it works. Over time, those lessons harden into conclusions, and those conclusions can become certainty.

There is nothing inherently wrong with certainty. We need some of it just to make our way through the day.

The danger comes when certainty becomes more important than truth.

I’ve been guilty of that.

I’ve been certain about things because my experiences told me I was right. I’ve defended conclusions when perhaps I should have been examining how I reached them. Sometimes admitting I was wrong required more than changing my mind. It required admitting that something I had carried for years no longer deserved the weight I had given it.

I’ve had to learn to say, Maybe I was wrong.

Those are four difficult words.

They are also four liberating ones.

Writing helps me practice that.

A thought looks different once I put it on paper. I can question it. Turn it around. Ask where it came from. Ask whether it came from experience, evidence, assumption, fear, or something somebody told me years ago that I never bothered to examine.

I’ve written questions I couldn’t answer.

Worse, I’ve written questions whose answers I didn’t particularly want to hear.

Not every belief survives the interrogation.

Maybe that’s the point.

I’ve also learned the value of patience and restraint.

There are times when everything in us says, Do something. Standing still feels like failure. Other people may be looking at you wondering why in the hell you’re not acting.

Sometimes they’re screaming it.

Good luck with that.

But sometimes standing there and thinking is exactly what needs to be done.

Action for the sake of action can create another problem before you’ve understood the first one. Sometimes you have to resist grabbing the nearest solution and give yourself enough time to understand what you’re actually looking at.

That’s difficult when somebody is demanding that you do something.

It’s even harder when the person demanding it is you.

Patience taught me that thinking is also an action.

Restraint taught me that knowing when not to act can be every bit as important as knowing what to do.

Maybe that’s why this promise still matters to me.

What scares me isn’t encountering something I don’t know. I’ve lived long enough to understand that there will always be more things I don’t know than things I do.

What scares me is reaching a point where I can no longer think my way through a problem.

I don’t need to have every answer.

I need to be able to look at what is in front of me, ask the right questions, examine what I think I know, recognize what I don’t know, and figure out where to start.

That’s why I keep reading. That’s why I keep writing down my thoughts and questions. That’s why I remain willing to reconsider things I once believed with certainty.

I’m not trying to know everything.

I’m trying to remain capable of figuring things out.

I have to admit there are days when I’m not as strong in keeping this promise as I am on others. There are days when I’m tired, distracted, or simply don’t feel like digging any deeper.

That’s part of the process too.

Keeping a promise doesn’t require perfection.

Sometimes it simply requires returning to it.

So I keep the faith.

I believe in the process of continual learning. There will always be something I don’t know, something I’ve misunderstood, something I’ve forgotten, or something I’ve been absolutely certain about that deserves another look.

I don’t expect to understand everything before my time here is finished.

I’m not sure I’d want to.

I just want to remain curious enough to keep asking the next question, humble enough to accept the answer when it isn’t the one I expected, and wise enough to know that tomorrow I may need to question that answer too.

That is the promise.

Not that I will always know.

That I will always be willing to learn.