"Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second." -Bernard Berenson

The following anecdote will require you to travel way, way, way back in time. To a time before you learned how to read. To fully understand the situation, it might help to look at a sentence written in a language foreign to you. A language that uses characters you do not recognize.

In the twenty years that I've lived in my house, my room has undergone many interior decoration transformations, some more serious than others. My earliest memory of my room includes a flattened Mylar balloon affixed to my closet door. Each night starting around 3 or 4 years of age, I would lie in bed staring at the balloon, trying to understand what the words said. I could barely read manuscript at the time, but even if I could, the skill would have been useless. This particular message was written in cursive, a completely separate beast. As my reading skills improved, I began to slowly decode the message. I remember a distinct period in time during which I believed the message to read It a a Sinl. Finally, one night, it hit me. It's a Girl! I still remember that feeling of utter elation. I was so proud of myself for having made this discovery all by myself. For having accomplished, what at one time, had seemed like an impossible feat.

That feeling of elation eventually wore off. As the years went on, I often tried (with no avail) to recreate that feeling of not understanding the message. I pretended I couldn't read the text. I wanted to once again experience the process of searching in completely unknown territory. To experience that moment of discovery. In a weird way, I longed to go back to a time when I didn't instantly have the answer.

In one of the most famous psychology experiments on selective attention, subjects were asked to watch a video of two teams, the White-Shirts and the Black-Shirts, passing a basketball and count the number of passes between the White team. Most got the number right. What subjects did not notice was (spoiler alert) a man dressed in a full gorilla suit walk straight through the basketball game. I too was tricked the first time I watched the video. Since that first time, though, every time I've watched the video, the gorilla has been glaringly apparent. It's difficult to return to a state of ignorance once you've seen the light.

A couple days ago, I was describing to someone a friend's startup. They provide interactive maps of libraries. It makes it so you can easily find what you need, I said. Paraphrased and perhaps hyperbolized, the response I received was But isn't the whole point of libraries to browse through rows of books and happen upon the perfect one?

In what I would identify as a sad state of affairs, people don't like to search anymore. Searching is no longer romantic. We come in knowing what we want and we want to find it immediately. We live in a world of instant search. One where the search is over before it even begins. Our world is all about answers. And in this fast-paced day in age, it's easy to get sucked in by instant gratification. But if you ask me, no amount of knowing, no single answer can substitute the liberating feeling of curiosity. Of wanting to know.

Most of Charles Dickens' novels initially appeared in serialized form in magazines and newspapers. Instead of writing the entire novel beforehand and publishing parts with each issue, he wrote each section as the novel was serialized. Dickens searched for an ending as he went along. He defined the search. He focused on the search. He allowed it to freely take course. And he created some of the world's best literature.

From your professional to family to social world, you are going to be asked a lot of questions in life. Know there's no pressure to have immediate answers. There's nothing wrong with not knowing an answer. What's important is having the thirst to search for an answer. The creativity to invent an answer. The capacity to accept multiple answers. The desire to strive to explore possible answers. And when you do it right, you'll know, because the search will be undeniably more fulfilling than the discovery itself.