The Smartest Person in the Room Asks the 'Dumbest' Questions

I learned that having the courage to expose the ambiguity makes you look smarter.

I was in a high-stakes meeting, way out of my depth as a more junior engineer.

I was surrounded by senior people, and they all kept using a term. It sounded like “gabagool.” It was so odd sounding that I couldn’t even spell it to look it up on my laptop.

I had absolutely no idea what it meant.

For five agonizing minutes, I sat there in a panic hoping the conversation wouldn’t come to me. I just nodded along, pretending to follow. My plan was to “stay quiet and look it up later.”

Then the most senior person there, a Director, held up his hand and cut the speaker off.

“I’m going to be the idiot here,” he said, looking around the table. “What exactly is ‘gabagool?’ Am I even saying it right?”

A funny thing happened. A few people let out a small sigh of relief. The presenter paused, looking confused. It turned out the term was a legacy system name that the other team called something else.

But the real discovery for me was that half the room was only pretending to know what it did. Nobody from…