My father stood in the doorway of our garage in Daly City when I was maybe eleven, holding a voltmeter he’d bought from a swap meet, squinting at the back of our broken TV. He hadn’t gone to school for electronics. He hadn’t gone to school for much of anything beyond what was available in his province before he came to the States with two suitcases and a wife who believed in him more than he believed in himself. But there he was, tracing wires, muttering to himself in Tagalog, a library book about basic circuitry open on the floor next to him with a coffee ring on page forty-seven. He fixed that TV. Took him three weekends. And when I asked him how he knew what to do, he said something I’ve been turning over for twenty-seven years: Hindi ko alam. Tinanong ko lang ang sarili ko kung ano ang posible. I didn’t know. I just asked myself what was possible.

I thought about that moment recently because Lea, my daughter, came home from school with a science project that had gone sideways. Her hypothesis didn’t hold up. She was upset, almost tearful, because she’d gotten the answer wrong. And I watched her sit at the kitchen table, paralyzed, waiting for me to tell her what the right answer was. She’s nine. She’s already been trained to believe that not knowing something is a problem to be ashamed of rather than a door to walk through.

That paralysis she felt is something I recognize. I felt it too, for years, all the way through nursing school and into my career. The formal education system gave me competence, credentials, a debt-free degree thanks to my father’s sacrifices. But it also gave me a particular relationship with uncertainty: avoid it. Uncertainty meant you hadn’t studied enough. Uncertainty meant failure was coming.

My father, who educated himself through necessity and curiosity, had a completely different relationship with not knowing. For him, not knowing was the starting position. Every single time. He didn’t experience it as failure. He experienced it as Tuesday.

The tolerance for not knowing

Research on self-directed education has explored the difference between self-directed learning and conventional schooling. Self-directed learners develop something that structured curricula often erode: the ability to sit with confusion long enough for genuine understanding to emerge. In a classroom, confusion is a signal that you’re behind. In self-directed learning, confusion is just the first five minutes of every new thing you try.

I saw this in my father constantly. He didn’t have a syllabus for fixing the plumbing, rewiring the garage lights, or figuring out the logistics software at the port when they upgraded systems and didn’t bother training the night shift workers. He just started. He asked questions of people who knew more. He read manuals that were written for people with engineering degrees, and he read them three times until they made sense. He got things wrong and tried a different approach without the kind of existential crisis I used to have when a patient’s labs didn’t match my textbook expectations.

For nine years in nursing, I was good at my job. Really good. I knew protocols. I could anticipate complications in med-surg before the monitors caught them. But I was operating from a map someone else had drawn. When the map didn’t match the territory, my first instinct was to check the map again, not to look more carefully at the territory.

My father’s first instinct was always the territory. The actual thing in front of him. The leaking pipe, the stuttering engine, the spreadsheet that didn’t add up. He didn’t consult the map because he’d never been given one. And that absence, which I spent most of my twenties pitying, turns out to have been a kind of cognitive advantage I didn’t have language for until recently.

Curiosity as a daily practice

There’s a useful framing from research on the power of curiosity that distinguishes between what psychologists call epistemic curiosity (the drive to acquire new knowledge) and diversive curiosity (the desire for novel stimulation). People who educate themselves tend to run on epistemic curiosity: the sustained, sometimes uncomfortable drive to actually understand something, not just encounter it. Formal education, especially when it relies on testing and grades, can inadvertently shift intrinsic motivation, sometimes encouraging the kind of learning that skims surfaces, collects enough to pass, and moves on.

My father was an epistemic learner by necessity. When he taught himself to manage supply chains at the port, he didn’t learn the overview version. He learned the version where, if he got it wrong, containers ended up in the wrong country and he lost his job. That kind of learning burns information into you differently.

I’ve written before about growing up in a household where asking for help was treated as failure, and I used to see my father’s self-reliance as part of that same pattern. Stubborn Filipino pride. The immigrant refusal to appear weak. And there’s truth in that reading. But there’s also something else happening underneath the pride, something I only started to see when I left nursing at thirty-five and had to figure out how to build a consultancy from nothing.

When I started my health equity consulting work, nobody handed me a curriculum. There was no orientation packet for “former burn-out nurse starts business serving immigrant communities.” I had to figure out everything: client acquisition, contracts, pricing, scope of work, how to talk about systemic health disparities in language that grant committees and hospital administrators would actually respond to. And for the first time in my adult life, I felt the way my father must have felt every day at the port. No map. Just the territory.

I was terrible at it initially. I priced myself too low. I over-delivered to the point of recreating the exact burnout conditions I’d left nursing to escape. But something else happened too: I started solving problems laterally. Instead of following a protocol, I started asking what’s actually going on here? instead of what does the textbook say should be going on? That shift, subtle as it sounds, changed everything about how I work.

The fundamentally different approach

Here’s the thing about people who learned through curiosity rather than curriculum: they tend to approach problems as open systems rather than closed puzzles. A closed puzzle has a defined answer. You learn the method, apply the method, arrive at the answer. An open system has multiple possible states, and the work is understanding the dynamics well enough to shift conditions, not to find the one right solution.

My father treated our house like an open system. When the heater broke, he didn’t just learn how to fix heaters. He learned about air flow, insulation, the way the fog rolled in off the Bay and hit our side of the hill first. He understood our house as a set of relationships between systems. So when Lea got her asthma diagnosis and I mentioned it on the phone, his first question wasn’t about medication. It was about the air ducts. He wanted to know when I’d last had them cleaned, whether I’d checked for mold behind the water heater, whether the bathroom fan vented outside or into the attic. He was thinking in systems. Her pediatrician, trained in a formal medical curriculum, went straight to the inhaler prescription. Both responses were valid. But they came from fundamentally different ways of understanding a problem.

People who’ve maintained genuine curiosity as a daily practice tend to develop what I’d call peripheral vision for problems. They see the edges, the context, the contributing factors that a trained specialist might bracket out as irrelevant. This doesn’t make them better than formally educated people. My nursing training saved lives. I’m grateful for every hour of pharmacology and pathophysiology I memorized. But the training also narrowed my vision in ways I didn’t notice until I was outside the system.

I came across a video recently from Justin Brown that examines how traditional therapy can sometimes create dependency loops instead of actual healing—it’s a parallel idea to what we’re talking about here, where institutional systems can inadvertently limit the very problem-solving they’re supposed to teach.

In my consultancy work now, I see this pattern constantly. The community health workers I collaborate with, many of them immigrants without advanced degrees, consistently identify barriers to care that credentialed public health researchers miss entirely. They see the transportation gap, the childcare gap, the cultural shame around certain diagnoses, the way a clinic’s intake form is written in English at a twelfth-grade reading level. They see these things because they live inside the system they’re trying to understand. Their knowledge is embodied, not abstracted.

What I’m teaching my kids

After Lea’s science project crisis, I sat with her and did something I wouldn’t have known to do five years ago. Instead of telling her the right answer, I asked her what she noticed. What actually happened in the experiment, separate from what she expected to happen. She wiped her eyes and said the plants with less sunlight actually grew taller, which was the opposite of her hypothesis. And I said: so what does that make you curious about?

Her face changed. Not dramatically. Just a small shift from shame to interest.

That shift is the whole thing. That’s the difference between education that creates people who can repeat answers and education that creates people who can sit with a broken TV on a Saturday afternoon with a library book and a voltmeter and not panic. Genuine interest in what you don’t know, held without shame, turns out to be one of the most powerful cognitive tools a person can develop. And formal education, for all its strengths, rarely teaches it. Sometimes it actively trains it out of you.

I think about my father’s hands, calloused from port work, reaching into the back of that television. He didn’t know what he was doing. He knew he didn’t know. And he started anyway. That comfort with not knowing, that willingness to ask what’s possible instead of what’s correct, is something I’m still learning at thirty-eight. He’s been doing it his whole life without ever once calling it a philosophy or a method. He just calls it getting things done.

Mateo asked him last month how he learned to fix so many things. My father shrugged. Nagtatanong lang ako, he said. I just keep asking. And then he handed Mateo a wrench and pointed at the dripping faucet in our kitchen, and they stood there together, two people with no formal plumbing education, making something work.