The Cost Of Certainty

Certainty is a convincing liar.

It doesn't shout. It doesn't force its way into your life. It slips in quietly, borrows your voice, and begins answering questions no one has asked. Before university, I mistook it for maturity. If I'm honest, I also mistook it for independence.

For most of my life, I had learned things on my own—graphic design, web development, cooking. If I didn't know something, I'd disappear into a corner with Google, YouTube, or my own stubbornness until I emerged with an answer. It became my default setting.-----So when I stepped onto campus, I carried that same mindset with me. I attended orientation, collected my documents, and found my lecture halls.

Right, I thought. I've got this.

[I didn't.]

What I didn't realize was that university had two curriculums. The official one was written in course outlines, lecture notes, and PDFs. The other was written in conversations. Nobody told me that some courses deserved more attention than others because of their unit load. Nobody explained the practical side of calculating a CGPA beyond the formula. Nobody sat me down to tell me that surviving university wasn't just about reading harder—it was about learning how university itself worked.

Or perhaps someone would have... if I had simply asked.

Instead, I assumed:

I assumed every course deserved the same weight.

I assumed every answer could be found in the notes.

I assumed if I studied well enough, everything else would sort itself out.

I assumed the book contained the whole story.

It didn't.-----Years later, I came across these words:"To answer before listening—that is folly and shame."

I used to think that verse was about conversations. Now I think it's about life. How many times had I answered before listening? How many conclusions had I reached before gathering enough evidence? How many opportunities had I quietly buried beneath the words, "I already know"?

The strange thing about the human mind is that it hates unfinished stories. Give it missing information and it will often manufacture an ending rather than tolerate uncertainty. Psychologists sometimes describe the brain as a prediction machine—it fills gaps before reality gets the chance to. It's efficient. It's also spectacularly wrong.

Looking back, nobody robbed me. Assumption did. It never emptied the house in one night. It preferred smaller thefts:

• An opportunity here.

• A conversation there.

• A friendship that never became one.

• Hours spent solving problems someone could have explained in five minutes.

Energy. Confidence. Perspective. The kind of losses you don't notice until you look back and realize how much lighter your life could have been.-----The Hidden Costs

The habit didn't stop with academics. I assumed lecturers were too busy for students, so I kept my distance. I assumed everyone else already knew what they were doing, so I hid my confusion. I assumed asking questions would make me look foolish.

[Funny enough, refusing to ask only guaranteed that I stayed foolish for longer.]

Then, sometime around my third year, my class representative said something so ordinary that I almost missed it: "If you need anything, just ask. Ask on the group, or come and meet me personally."

I remember sitting there thinking, People actually do that? It sounds ridiculous now. But until that moment, I genuinely believed university was every student for themselves. No one had told me otherwise. More accurately... I had never asked.-----Looking Forward

I still assume more often than I'd like to admit. Old habits are patient. They wait quietly for moments of uncertainty before offering certainty as a shortcut. Sometimes I still take it. Sometimes I still write stories in my head before reality has written its first sentence.

The difference now is that I've learned to distrust answers that arrive too quickly.

Some truths are found by asking. Others are found by waiting long enough to discover that the story you've been telling yourself was never the story at all. If university taught me anything in those first few months, it wasn't hidden in a lecture note or buried inside a textbook. It was this:

Knowledge doesn't only live in books.

• Some of it lives in questions.

• Some of it lives in people.

• And both remain inaccessible to anyone too certain to ask.

And If I could speak to the version of me that walked onto campus, I wouldn't tell him to study harder. I'd tell him to ask one more question. It would have cost him a few seconds of embarrassment and saved him years of unnecessary loss.