>>14224170People who excel in life enjoy the feeling of stupidity. It never goes away.
I finished my PhD last year, and I felt like I didn't know things until the very end, and I still don't know things. I'll have to re-read papers and look up stuff or ask a lot of questions if it's not completely in my field- and that's normal.
It's called being human.
When training people (interns/newer PhD students), there were only 2 things that indicated to me that they'd be good:
1) they asked a lot of questions, all the time
2) they were totally fine not knowing something and needing to ask about it, aka they were okay feeling stupid about it. It's almost like 1), but definitely slightly different.
People who came in that were "smart" and didn't ask questions, who pretended they knew what I just said/you could tell were pretending to know and were going to immediately look it up later; those were not successful people.
You have to embrace feeling dumb all the time. In my new job, I ask questions constantly and I don't know shit. It becomes weird when people bring me onto calls because I'm the expert at X so I'm sorta a consultant in the discussion/person they defer to with questions, but at the end of the day- you HAVE to embrace feeling stupid. feeling stupid is the only way to say "I don't know, cool lets figure it out". There is no point where you wake up and say "I know everything! I can figure everything out instantly below X class because I took X class!" Learning isn't a "level up to level 10, now every other subject you know is at level 10", it's "you became FAMILIAR with concept Y, now you are familiar with it." That's basically it: getting familiar with subjects.
Embrace the feeling. When you get over your insecurities about feeling stupid, you'll realize it's actually an awesome feeling to not know something and to seek out the answer.
