If you want to understand today,
you have to search yesterday.
—Pearl S. Buck}
The More You Learn,
the More You Realize
What You Don’t KnowI
remember when a friend was studying history and he spent a
long time on World War II. I mentioned that he must be an ex-
pert after the amount of time he’d spent on it, and he replied, “It
only made me realize how much I didn’t know. Because in order
to understand WWII, you have to go back to WWI. So now I’m
studying WWI, and I’m sure I’ll have to go further back to un-
derstand how WWI came about. It will be a never-ending process.”
This guy was a real scholar, but he mentioned that studying his-
tory had made him very humble—because he knew he’d never
know it all no matter how much he studied.
I always remember what this guy said, about learning how
much he didn’t know, and how every time you learn one thing, it
leads to another thing and so on. He went on to become a highly
respected historian, but I can assure you that he isn’t resting on his
many laurels. The humility that studying history has given him