If you’re clever in school it can take a long time to grasp that you are clueless elsewhere. Gathering clues proceeds slowly.
An example that comes to mind was a math class in my second year in college. Professor Tucker mentioned that he had asked Professor Kuhn from the Economics Department to cover for him in Friday’s class. This was when it dawned on me that I was learning the Kuhn-Tucker algorithm in our textbook from its creators. Over the years, I’ve shared this story as an example of the quality of the education I was receiving. It only now occurs to me that it was equally a marker of my cluelessness.
My wife is on record that, based on photographic evidence of my sartorial choices then, she would have crossed the street to avoid me in college.
I could go on.
It’s hard to be surprised by something that you don’t notice. Professionally, I spent much of my career noticing systems and processes and designing better ones. To use Wendell Berry’s term, I “solved for pattern” I believed in organizations that wanted to behave more rationally. I cleaned up messes.
Where I got, and get, in trouble is with those who thrive on creating messes. This is less of an issue in retirement. I can avoid many chaos creators. In the wider world, that has become difficult of late. In the end it depends on getting better at noticing.