It Is OK If You Don’t Know Something
Highly Effective Work Habits: It Is OK If You Don’t Know Something
I’m sure most of you out there want to try to work on things yourselves without any help. There isn’t anything wrong with this – unless you spend too much time here spinning your wheels. At some point, you have to ask for help to keep your work on schedule and meet your deadlines. Especially if you are juggling multiple tasks, you need to practice good time management skills and determine how much time to spend on something before asking for help.
Depending on your personality and the culture you work in, you may not want to look uneducated or you may think that your peers will think less of you if you have to ask for help. It is ok if you don’t have the answers. As I have said before, no one is perfect. There are no omnipotent beings out there that know it all. Even in your career field, trust me, you don’t know everything. If you did, wouldn’t you think you’d be running the company by now? 
And, hopefully, you don’t work in an environment where they expect you to know everything because that is not fair. Everyone at one point or another has to look up information and struggle through issues to figure them out. Most learning comes from failure. So, if you don’t know something, just ask around for help. I wrote a previous article about proper research techniques, so definitely run through those first and don’t be afraid to seek help if you exhaust your options. The earlier you can seek help and get the answers, the more time you have to fix issues and move onto something else.
Another tip in this area is to write down the answer once you have it. You will definitely start looking bad if you keep going back to the same person asking the same questions over and over again. Not making the same mistakes repeatedly shows your employer that you can learn from your mistakes and move forward to resolve problems more effectively.
