In our last article, we talked about how to take advice—why we resist it, and what separates those who benefit from it from those who ignore it. But let’s go a step further.
What if people never even acknowledge they need advice in the first place?
There’s an unspoken rule in many cultures (India included) that admitting you’re bad at something is worse than actually being bad at it.
This is why bluffing, posturing, and empty confidence dominate in so many professional and social spaces. There’s a deep-seated belief that incompetence is a moral failing, rather than a simple gap in knowledge. And when people feel ashamed to admit their weaknesses, they don’t improve—because they never get the help they need.
Why This Happens
Some of this is cultural. Studies like the Hofstede Index show that countries with high power distance (India, China, much of Latin America) tend to equate knowledge with authority. If you admit you don’t know something, you lose face. In contrast, countries with lower power distance (the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia) have a more open culture around trial, failure, and learning.
In India, this plays out in a few obvious ways:
- Job interviews: Candidates would rather bluff through an answer than say, “I don’t know, but I can learn.”
- Corporate culture: Many managers would rather give bad instructions than ask their team for better solutions.
- Entrepreneurship: Startups burn money pretending they “know” the market instead of running real experiments.
- Education: Students are afraid to ask questions in class for fear of looking dumb.
The Cost of Pretending
When people can’t admit what they don’t know, they:
- Make avoidable mistakes that could be fixed with one honest conversation
- Stagnate because they never ask for help
- Create a culture of mediocrity, where bad work is defended instead of improved
Worse, it turns incompetence into something permanent. If you pretend to be good at something for long enough, you stop feeling the need to get better.
How to Fix This
- Normalize “I don’t know.” It’s the first step to learning.
- Encourage questions. The best workplaces (and countries) reward curiosity, not punish it.
- Separate identity from skill. Being bad at something doesn’t mean you’re bad as a person. It just means you haven’t put in the work yet.
Great cultures—and great people—are built on the ability to say, “I don’t know, but I want to learn.”
So, where do you need to get better?