Stay humble. Stay hungry. Stay teachable. Keep learning. Keep getting smarter. But for goodness’ sake… MOVE!
“I’d rather have ignorance on fire than knowledge on ice.”
I look back at the first eight or nine years of building Atlas, and if I had to describe a lot of what we were doing, it would probably be exactly that: IGNORANCE ON FIRE.
We didn’t know everything. Shoot, there were seasons we barely knew anything. We didn’t have the perfect org chart. We didn’t have any sort of sophisticated dashboards. We didn’t have documented SOP’s. I certainly didn’t understand everything I know today about finance, leadership, operations, sales, culture, or scaling a business.
But you know what we DID have? FIRE.
We moved. We tried things. We made decisions quick. We screwed things up, learned from them, and tried again. We sold services we had never sold before and then figured out how to produce them. We hired people before we completely understood organizational structure. We chased opportunities before we knew exactly where they were going to lead.
And somehow, that little landscaping company that started in the driveway just kept growing.
Not because we knew everything. Because we were willing to MOVE.
Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to meet some incredibly intelligent people. People with degrees, experience, incredible ideas, and more technical knowledge than I’ll probably ever have. And some of them are still living incredibly average lives. Some are stuck in comfortable, mediocre careers or businesses they have complained about for years.
It’s not because they aren’t capable. It’s because they’re frozen.
They need more information. More research. More certainty. A better economy. A better opportunity. A better plan. They know enough to recognize every possible thing that could go wrong, so eventually they convince themselves that doing nothing is the safest decision.
That’s KNOWLEDGE ON ICE.
Meanwhile, there’s somebody else out there who doesn’t know half as much, but they’re humble enough to admit what they don’t know, hungry enough to go find the answer, and absolutely ON FIRE to build something.
Show me a humble, hungry, maybe even slightly ignorant person ON FIRE, and I’ll show you somebody who’s about to build something EPIC.
Give me that person every single time.
Because here’s the part people miss: ignorance isn’t the goal. Learning is. Wisdom matters. Mentorship matters. Experience matters. Knowing your numbers matters. Building systems matters. The goal isn’t to stay ignorant – the goal is to never allow what you learn to extinguish the FIRE that got you moving in the first place.
Eventually, ignorance on fire needs to become KNOWLEDGE ON FIRE.
And THAT is when somebody becomes absolute dangerous.
It’s the hunger of the beginner combined with the wisdom of experience. It’s being confident enough to move but humble enough to never stop learning. It’s understanding that you don’t need to know the entire staircase before you’re willing to take the first step.
Looking back, I’m actually thankful I didn’t know everything I know today when I started out. Because if I had fully understood the risk, the headaches, the sleepless nights, the payroll pressure, the people problems, the mistakes, and just how difficult building a company would become… I might have been smart enough to talk myself out of it.
How many incredible businesses were never started because somebody researched themselves out of starting? How many books were never written? How many careers were never changed? How many dreams never made it past someone’s notebook because they were waiting until they felt completely ready?
Sometimes you don’t need another book, another podcast, another seminar, another spreadsheet, or another six months to think about it.
Sometimes you just need to LIGHT THE MATCH.
Stay humble. Stay hungry. Stay teachable. Keep learning. Keep getting smarter. But for goodness’ sake…
MOVE.
Because I’ll take IGNORANCE ON FIRE over KNOWLEDGE ON ICE any day.
But give me someone with KNOWLEDGE ON FIRE? Now we’re about to build something EPIC.