The cost of not knowing things
Many times in my life, I have realized that it can turn out to be very costly if you do not have full information about something. And it can be even costlier if you mistakenly think you know everything there is to know. Let me explain. There are many incidents that come to mind, but two specific ones stand out.
The first was during my preparation for the IIT exams in India. I was completely unaware of how much it takes to prepare for these exams, how different the environment is from regular schooling, and the sheer amount of time you need to put in. I was under the impression that if I was good at school, I would naturally be good at the coaching entrance exams.
That assumption turned out to be pretty bad. These entrance exams help you get admission to a coaching institute at a discounted rate if you perform well. Because I am not from a financially affluent background, these exams were my only hope of getting into a good coaching institute, which in turn was my only hope of getting into a good college. But I did not know that the entrance exam had a very different syllabus from what I was being taught in school.
I failed pretty badly in my first exam and didn’t get any scholarship. It was devastating. I was surprised as to why that was the case, and it took me a while to absorb the fact that I couldn’t get enough scores to be anywhere near the top. But the reality quickly sunk in after the results: the exam wasn’t just hard, it was just a completely different syllabus.
The next year, I made sure that I actually went through the syllabus. It was a very simple syllabus—I just needed to be aware of it. I ended up getting a full scholarship for the coaching institute I went with, and that was the only way I could have gotten in. This instance really cemented the point for me: if you do not know about something and you are not prepared, you can never compete. You don’t even have a chance to give it a fair shot.
The second instance is when I landed in the US in December 2022. When I arrived, I assumed my company would take care of everything and whatever needed to happen with immigration would just be handled by them. I did not realize how important the PERM process is, how important it is to get a priority date, or how important an I-140 is.
My company’s PERM process was frozen, and it wasn’t resumed until 2025. I didn’t realize how sensitive the priority queue is for Indian immigrants, where even a one-month delay can actually move things back by multiple months from a change-of-status point of view. Not having that information upfront ended up being an expensive lesson in how the system works.
This entire process takes time and it shifts the timeline for permanent residency by a lot. It is much better to start it early. Even if your company is not applying for it, you should change companies, get exceptions, push for it, or try alternative routes that are under your control, like an EB-2 NIW. It is very important to get a priority date as an immigrant, especially for immigrants facing huge backlogs like those from India and China. So yes, the cost of not knowing things is very high.
But it is also about balance. Since I realized this fact, I have sometimes started to over-index on finding things out beforehand. That can lead down another rabbit hole where you find out a lot of things, but you never act on them. Knowing a bunch of things without capitalizing on them is its own problem.
If times are changing—and right now with AI, everything is changing incredibly fast—learning something but failing to capitalize on it isn’t always a good investment. If learning is just for learning’s sake, then that’s fine. But if learning is for the sake of capitalizing on it, it needs to be time-bound. You learn, you capitalize, you exit, and then you learn the next thing.
There needs to be a balance. You cannot live in a world where you do not know about things and just accept whatever happens, unless you are truly okay with any outcome. Conversely, you cannot try to find out everything about everything to find the single best possible answer. We are constrained by time and energy; it is physically impossible to know it all. There has to be a balance, but it is still fundamentally important to know about things—that kind of awareness really helps.