No matter how much you think you know, you can still know more. No matter your age or experience, no matter your intelligence or expertise, there is always something you may have overlooked.
Even though I've enjoyed history and geography all my life, it's only been recently that I've discovered how big a continent Africa really is, seeing maps that demonstrated that the US, China, Western and Eastern Europe all could be contained within its mass! Even though I'm not bad enough to be on Worst Cooks in America, when watching the show, I'm always surprised by a kitchen utensil that I was unfamiliar with, like who knew there was a mandoline, and that it was a cutting tool and not a musical instrument? Even though I'm a CPA who has done taxes every year for the last two decades, there are always unique situations I've never run across, where I learn rules and regulations I hadn't considered before (some estimates put the tax codes, including annotations, at around 70,000 pages, and whatever the Republicans did in their recent tax bill, I don't think they made that any shorter).
But what shocked me most recently was in my beloved hobby career, writing.
I was at a Writer's Guild meeting, with the latest copy of my novel, proud as punch at my self-publishing efforts. A friend sitting next to me opened it up, and I was ready to be swimming in praise. Instead, she pointed to the first paragraph (only a whopping two words) and asked, "Why is it there?"
"Why is what where?" I asked. She was pointing to the left of the two words, just about five spaces to the left. I was vastly puzzled, but the meeting went on and I wasn't able to figure it out.
Until about a week later, when I realized that what she was wondering was why I indented the first paragraph. At first, I thought, why in the world would I do that? Then I looked at some other books that I had, and I discovered that many of them (but not all) did not indent the first paragraph in a series of paragraphs. Paragraphs following the first would be indented, but when a new chapter would start, the first paragraph would not be indented.
It's not like I come to this blindly. I am an avid reader and have read thousands of books in my life. I love to hang at libraries and bookstores, and I surround myself with books at home. How could I not know this? How did something so basic escape my attention?
My only excuse is that when I read, I'm reading for pleasure and information, not for observing formatting and manuscript presentation. Reexamining a variety of books from different publishing time periods, I find that it's not universal, but it is more common than not. Many don't indent the first paragraph of a chapter. Some don't indent the first paragraph following a space break of paragraphs, even in the middle of chapters, I guess to delineate another scene or a new chain of ideas. One thing that is done often is to make the first letter of the unindented paragraph extra big.
This is an example of that. Yeah, I can tell you won't see that often in a self-published book. That is a pain to do, especially in the word processing program I use.
When writing on the blog, I don't indent any paragraphs. I don't know if that's right or wrong, but it seems to be fairly common. It's also how I send my newspaper columns, and they reformat it to their newspaper standards.
Every day, there is more to know. But don't fear knowledge. Learning things that are new to you means that you are still growing, open to expanding your world. No one should be afraid of admitting that you have knowledge gaps, and are able to accommodate and improve. No one can know everything.
In fact, what you should be afraid of is the person who thinks they already know everything and refuses to learn or change. Those who already feel like they're the smartest person in the room, and don't need to listen to new information or anything that could cause them to change and adapt.
It's good to know that you are smart. It's an important trait, though, of being smart to realize that you don't know everything and are capable of learning more. It's the difference between being smart, and being, like, really smart.
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