I love seeing the moment in a meeting when someone gets asked a question they don't have the answer to, and instead of fumbling or deflecting, they simply say: "Honestly, I don't know yet. But I'll figure it out." No defensiveness, no hand-waving, no elaborate theoretical explanation to mask uncertainty. Just a straightforward acknowledgment of what they don't know, followed by confidence that they'll solve it.
Something shifts in the room when this happens. People relax. They start offering suggestions. What could have been an awkward gotcha moment turns into a collaborative problem-solving session. I've seen this play out dozens of times, and it never gets old. It captures something I've come to believe deeply: the willingness to say "I don't know, but I'll figure it out" is one of the most underrated skills in engineering.
This is something I noticed in my best teachers, whether in academia, personal life, or professional settings. They didn't always have the answer on the spot, but they never pretended otherwise. Instead, they'd say "let me look into that" and actually follow up later after they'd figured it out. What made them exceptional wasn't just the follow-through. It was that they'd often involve you in the journey, sharing what they discovered, how they found it, and what surprised them along the way. They modeled curiosity rather than omniscience, and that stuck with me more than any lecture ever did.
The fear of not knowing
Here's the thing: many talented people are terrified of admitting they don't know something. The tech industry, with its rapid evolution and constant stream of new frameworks, languages, and paradigms, creates a pressure to always appear knowledgeable. Admitting uncertainty feels like admitting inadequacy.
I've seen this play out in countless ways. Engineers who stay silent in meetings rather than ask clarifying questions. Leaders who make confident-sounding decisions based on incomplete understanding. Teams that commit to unrealistic timelines because nobody wanted to say "I need more time to investigate this." The cost isn't just technical debt or missed deadlines. It's a culture where appearing to know replaces actually learning.
Daniel Pink's "Drive" offers a framework for understanding why this matters. Pink argues that intrinsic motivation (the kind that actually leads to great work) comes from three elements: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. The "figure it out" mindset is fundamentally about mastery. Not mastery as a destination, but mastery as an ongoing pursuit. The people who can say "I don't know" aren't admitting defeat. They're demonstrating they care more about getting it right than looking right.
Where this comes from
I've been thinking about whether there's a cultural element to this mindset, and I keep coming back to my own upbringing.
I grew up in Colombia in the 90s, in an environment where resources were scarce and "just buy a new one" wasn't usually an option. When the stove broke down, you didn't call a repairman. You opened it up and figured out how it worked until you fixed it. When the chair leg fell off, you got the hammer and nails and made it work again. When something needed doing, the default response was "we'll figure it out," because the alternative was going without.
This wasn't unique to my family. It was the general approach among most people I knew. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. When you can't rely on having the right tools, the right parts, or the right expertise readily available, you develop a different relationship with problem-solving. You learn that not knowing how to do something is just the starting point, not the ending point.
That mindset has stuck with me through my entire career. I approach professional challenges the same way my parents approached a broken appliance: with the assumption that I might not know how to fix it yet, but I will. The "yet" is important. It transforms "I don't know" from a statement of limitation to a statement of intent.
What I've realized more recently is that this isn't just something you carry from childhood. It's something you can actively cultivate. My partner and I have built this into how we navigate life together. Neither of us has all the answers when facing big decisions (career changes, moves, the thousand uncertainties that come with building a life), but we've made curiosity our default response. "I don't know how this works, but let's find out" becomes the starting point rather than the obstacle. That shared orientation turns uncertainty from something that paralyzes into something that propels us forward. It's easier to leap into the unknown when someone's figuring it out alongside you.
The opposite of figuring it out
There's a scene from The Simpsons I think about often. Ned Flanders is a rowdy, misbehaving child (which is already funny if you know the adult Ned), and his bohemian parents are at the therapist complaining about his behavior. The father throws up his hands and declares: "We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"
I use this line humorously, but it captures something real. I've encountered this attitude in professional settings more times than I'd like to admit. The person who hits one obstacle and decides the task is impossible. The team that abandons an approach after a single failed attempt. The engineer who says "it can't be done" when what they mean is "I don't know how to do it."
The difference between "we've tried nothing and we're out of ideas" and "I don't know but I'll figure it out" isn't intelligence or technical skill. It's orientation. One treats not-knowing as a wall, the other treats it as a door. In my experience, this orientation matters more for career growth than raw technical ability. Seniority requires business acumen, social skills, and problem-solving capacity. All of these are enhanced by the willingness to tackle unfamiliar challenges rather than avoid them.
The practice of figuring it out
I've noticed that people who embody the "figure it out" mindset share some common habits:
They break problems into smaller pieces. When faced with something they don't understand, they don't try to grasp everything at once. They find one small part they can make progress on and start there. Each small victory builds context for tackling the next piece.
They're comfortable with partial understanding. They don't wait until they understand everything to start taking action. They form hypotheses, test them, learn from the results, and iterate. The understanding comes through doing, not before it.
They ask questions without shame. They treat knowledge gaps as information to share, not weaknesses to hide. "I've never worked with this technology before, can you point me to good resources?" is a strength, not a confession.
They view failure as data. When an approach doesn't work, they extract what they learned and try something else. They don't take failed attempts personally or let them diminish their confidence that a solution exists.
They maintain irrational optimism. This one is personal, but I genuinely believe it helps. I tend to have a positive view on whether problems are solvable, even when the evidence is uncertain. It might be slightly delusional, but here's how I see it: if people can be negative for no reason, I can be positive for no reason. And being positive makes me more likely to keep trying, which makes me more likely to succeed.
Why this matters now more than ever
As AI increasingly handles routine technical tasks, the premium shifts to exactly this kind of adaptive problem-solving. The engineer who can navigate ambiguity, learn new domains quickly, and synthesize solutions across unfamiliar territory becomes more valuable, not less. AI can generate code for well-defined problems, but it struggles with the messy, undefined challenges where the first step is figuring out what the actual problem is.
The "figure it out" mindset is also, I think, increasingly important for team culture. In environments where psychological safety exists (where people feel safe admitting what they don't know), teams learn faster, catch mistakes earlier, and collaborate more effectively. When the senior engineer says "I'm not sure how this should work, let's figure it out together," they're modeling behavior that makes everyone better.
The permission to not know
If I'm honest, I didn't always feel comfortable admitting uncertainty. Earlier in my career, I worried that saying "I don't know" would undermine my credibility. It took time to realize that credibility comes from consistently figuring things out, not from pretending to already know everything. The people I respected most were often the ones most willing to say "that's a great question, I need to think about it."
So here's what I'd offer to anyone who resonates with this: give yourself permission to not know things. Not knowing is the starting state for every skill you've ever acquired, every problem you've ever solved, every achievement you're proud of. The question isn't whether you know, it's whether you're willing to do the work to find out.
The stove will break. The chair leg will fall off. The production system will fail in ways nobody anticipated. The project will hit requirements nobody understood at the start.
I don't know how to handle all of it. But I'll figure it out.