When one of my sons was three, his ambition in life was to know everything there was to know. At that stage it seemed, to his mind, perfectly achievable. Indeed, there’s a famous bumper sticker that says ‘Employ a teenager, while they still know everything’.

I suppose it could be depressing to discover that when you really start to get deeply into a subject that fascinates you, the expanse of knowledge opens up and the further you get into it, the further the horizon extends. The more you learn, the more conscious you are of your own ignorance.

Of course the better way to view this is to be excited at how much there always is to learn, and to enjoy the process. What would actually be depressing would be knowing everything there is to know and being unable to enjoy the subject any more. Yes, it’s daunting to find how much more there is to learn, but it gives you so much scope to get stuck into something that fascinates you. And remember, everyone else is in the same position. Even the world expert on a subject will know only the tip of the iceberg. They will, however, probably be fairly knowledgeable about the size of the iceberg – they’ll understand their own areas of ignorance better than most.

What’s more, the experts will also recognise that not everything accepted as fact is necessarily so, certain as it seems. The younger you are, the more often things can seem to be black and white. As you get older, most subjects appear in greyscale, with more nuances and subtleties than you realised before. This is especially true of topics such as religion and politics, not to mention more everyday – but still important – practical skills such as management or parenting.

When I was a child, I knew almost everything there was to know about dinosaurs. No one knew a lot at the time, so we were all experts. There were probably only about half a dozen dinosaurs that were widely known, and little did we realise at the time that even one of those never existed.²² The real experts, however, understood how much more there was to learn. That’s when you can start to call yourself an expert – when you can grasp the extent of your ignorance.

I have a friend who recently started to retrain as a psychotherapist in her forties. She researched it a fair bit before she started the training, but once she was properly underway she discovered that there were far more branches of the subject and far more training options than she’d realised. The further she got into it, the more possibilities opened up. This is the way of things, and it is both scary and thrilling. Be thrilled by it and enjoy the journey. You’ll never be able to see the whole of the ocean, but you will see far more of it if you row out to the middle than you ever will if you stand on the shore just dabbling your toes.