Beware the price of wisdom...
Jason Bassford, August 8, 2000
This isn't so much an essay as a brief word of explanation
as to the meaning of our company's slogan (i.e. the title of
this article). As such, it doesn't really belong here - but,
among the places it could have been put, this was the best
choice. Then again, while the thoughts expressed here are
meant to apply specifically to our own company, they are also
easily portable - so they may have a general applicability
after all.
It's almost humorous because neither my partner nor I realised
a certain implication of the slogan until after we'd come up with
it and made it official. In fact, it was pointed out to us at a
family gathering in which, after hearing it, much laughter
ensued. I have to admit that there is certainly room for jest
in the jibe that our services, as the slogan might be taken to
mean, will be "expensive". That certainly wasn't what we'd
meant to convey when we thought of it.
The meaning of the slogan, as I see it, is twofold:
- A little knowledge can often be more dangerous than no
knowledge at all. This is something that, in my years of
experience in the field, I've come to recognise as a universal
truth. If you know just enough about something to take control
of it and attempt to change it to do what you want, but not
enough to really know what affects this will have, you
can end up in a situation far worse than the one you were trying
to change in the first place. In other words, you shouldn't
start messing with something unless you really know what you're
doing; if you aren't sure of yourself there's nothing wrong with
stopping and asking for advice. This applies to all of us, in
all aspects of life.
- The more you know, the more you know that you don't know.
This is another "truism" that I've come to believe in. Partly
as a philosopher (see my Web site link from the "Who's in charge."
section off of Inferno's home page), and just as somebody who's
got more than just a couple years of living under my belt, I
think that there's no end to the amount of learning / growing we
each have to do, nor to the amount of knowledge we are able to
acquire. As we learn more about something, it also becomes more
and more obvious just how much there is to know about it.
In my mind, the wisest person is one who realises just how much
they don't know.
