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It has long been said that the three hardest words to say in the English language are I love you. We heartily disagree! For most people, it is much harder to say I don’t know. That’s a shame, for until you can admit what you don’t yet know, it’s virtually impossible to learn what you need to.

If the consequences of pretending to know can be so damaging, why do people keep doing it? That’s easy: in most cases, the cost of saying “I don’t know” is higher than the cost of being wrong—at least for the individual.

But when it comes to solving problems, one of the best ways to start is by putting away your moral compass. Why? When you are consumed with the rightness or wrongness of a given issue—whether it’s fracking or gun control or genetically engineered food—it’s easy to lose track of what the issue actually is. A moral compass can convince you that all the answers are obvious (even when they’re not); that there is a bright line between right and wrong (when often there isn’t); and, worst, that you are certain you already know everything you need to know about a subject so you stop trying to learn more.

While one might expect that suicide is highest among people whose lives are the hardest, research by Lester and others suggests the opposite: suicide is more common among people with a higher quality of life. “If you’re unhappy and you have something to blame your unhappiness on—if it’s the government, or the economy, or something—then that kind of immunizes you against committing suicide,” he says. “It’s when you have no external cause to blame for your unhappiness that suicide becomes more likely. I’ve used this idea to explain why African-Americans have lower suicide rates, why blind people whose sight is restored often become suicidal, and why adolescent suicide rates often rise as their quality of life gets better.”

Let us all take encouragement from the kids’ progress. The next time you run into a question that you can only pretend to answer, go ahead and say “I don’t know”—and then follow up, certainly, with “but maybe I can find out.” And work as hard as you can to do that. You may be surprised by how receptive people are to your confession, especially when you come through with the real answer a day or a week later.

But a mountain of recent evidence suggests that teacher skill has less influence on a student’s performance than a completely different set of factors: namely, how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether the parents have instilled an appetite for education. If these home-based inputs are lacking, there is only so much a school can do. Schools have your kid for only seven hours a day, 180 days a year, or about 22 percent of the child’s waking hours. Nor is all that time devoted to learning, once you account for socializing and eating and getting to and from class. And for many kids, the first three or four years of life is all parents and no school.

The first is about problem solving generally. Kobayashi redefined the problem he was trying to solve. What question were his competitors asking? It was essentially: How do I eat more hot dogs? Kobayashi asked a different question: How do I make hot dogs easier to eat? This question led him to experiment and gather the feedback that changed the game. Only by redefining the problem was he able to discover a new set of solutions.

even elite athletes can be tricked into improvement by essentially lying to them. In one experiment, cyclists were told to pedal a stationary bike at top speed for the equivalent of 4,000 meters. Later they repeated the task while watching an avatar of themselves pedaling in the earlier time trial. What the cyclists didn’t know was that the researchers had turned up the speed on the avatar. And yet the cyclists were able to keep up with their avatars, surpassing what they thought had been their top speed. “It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ,” said the esteemed neurologist Roger Bannister, best known as the first human to run the mile in less than four minutes.

Why is it so important to have fun? Because if you love your work (or your activism or your family time), then you’ll want to do more of it. You’ll think about it before you go to sleep and as soon as you wake up; your mind is always in gear. When you’re that engaged, you’ll run circles around other people even if they are more naturally talented. From what we’ve seen personally, the best predictor of success among young economists and journalists is whether they absolutely love what they do. If they approach their job like—well, a job—they aren’t likely to thrive. But if they’ve somehow convinced themselves that running regressions or interviewing strangers is the funnest thing in the world, you know they have a shot.

“Every magician will tell you the same thing,” says Alex Stone, whose book Fooling Houdini explores the science of deception. “When you really start to look at magic and how it works—the sort of nuts and bolts of how magic fools us—you start to ask some rather profound questions,” he says. “You know, how do we perceive reality? How much of what we perceive is actually real? How much faith can we have in our memories?”

4.  Kids are genuinely curious. In Stone’s experience, an adult may be hell-bent on blowing up a trick in order to upstage the magician. (Such people are called “hammers.”) A kid, meanwhile, “is really trying to figure out how the trick works, because that’s what you’re doing as a kid—trying to figure out how the world works.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote across many genres, including children’s books. In an essay called “Why I Write for Children,” he explained the appeal. “Children read books, not reviews,” he wrote. “They don’t give a hoot about the critics.” And: “When a book is boring, they yawn openly, without any shame or fear of authority.” Best of all—and to the relief of authors everywhere—children “don’t expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity.”

The standard answer would be to pay them more. But Zappos couldn’t afford that. Instead, it offered more fun and more power. That’s why company meetings are sometimes held in a bar. And why a stroll through the cubicles at Zappos feels like a trip to Mardi Gras, with music, games, and costumes. Customer reps are encouraged to talk to a customer for as long as they want (all without a script, natch); they are authorized to settle problems without calling in a supervisor and can even “fire” a customer who makes trouble. Just how desirable is a call-center job at Zappos? In a recent year when it hired 250 new employees, the company fielded 25,000 applications—for a job that pays only $11 per hour!

4.  Whenever possible, create incentives that switch the frame from adversarial to cooperative.

Here’s how Herley put it in a research paper: “The goal of the e-mail is not so much to attract viable users as to repel the non-viable ones, who greatly outnumber them. . . . A less-outlandish wording that did not mention Nigeria would almost certainly gather more total responses and more viable responses, but would yield lower overall profit. . . . [T]hose who are fooled for a while but then figure it out, or who balk at the last hurdle, are precisely the expensive false positives that the scammer must deter.”

People who did well on the math and science quiz were more likely to hold an extreme view of climate change in one direction or another—that is, to consider it either gravely dangerous or wildly overblown. This seems odd, doesn’t it? People with higher science and math scores are presumably better educated, and we all know that education creates enlightened, moderate people, not extremists—don’t we? Not necessarily. Terrorists, for example, tend to be significantly better educated than their non-terrorist peers. As the CCP researchers discovered, so do climate-change extremists.

Google has already driven its fleet of autonomous cars more than 500,000 miles on real roads throughout the United States without causing an accident.