Ninguém nasce ensinado
No one is born knowing everything — and the popular wisdom hidden in that phrase
A few weeks ago my co-founder Ivo Bernardo wrote a post called Raising the Ceiling, about the invisible limits we build for ourselves and how the job keeps changing even when the title doesn’t. Somewhere in the middle of it, he very publicly dared me to write about how I approach this — so, Ivo, this one’s on you.
The catch is that I don’t have a framework for it. When I sat down to figure out what I actually believe about learning and growing, I didn’t end up with management theory. I ended up with the proverbs my grandparents used to throw at me before I was old enough to argue back. So consider this a post built on sabedoria popular — Portuguese popular wisdom, which is brutal and economical, compressing entire leadership theories into six words and then walking away without explaining.
It starts with admitting you don’t know
There’s a Portuguese saying: ninguém nasce ensinado. No one is born knowing everything.
It sounds obvious, almost too simple to be useful. But the first step to learning anything is admitting you don’t know it yet — and that’s the step most people skip. We’re terrible at it. Admitting ignorance feels like a confession, so instead we nod along, fake the context, and quietly hope nobody asks a follow-up question.
But you can’t fill a cup that’s already pretending to be full. The people who grow fastest are the ones comfortable saying “I don’t know this yet” out loud. Everyone starts at zero. The only question is whether you’re honest about it.
You learn most when you’re uncomfortable
There’s a Portuguese saying — a necessidade é que aguça o engenho, necessity is what sharpens the wit. And it’s true: there’s a kind of learning that only happens when there’s no way out.
Books are comfortable. Watching someone else do it is comfortable. The real learning starts when you’re dropped into a situation you’re not ready for, the safety net is gone, and the only option left is to figure it out. We even have a word for this — desenrascanço, the art of getting yourself out of a mess with whatever you have on hand. It’s almost a national skill, and it’s not taught anywhere. You only develop it because at some point you had no choice.
That’s not an accident of personality. It’s where the steepest part of the learning curve actually lives. Comfort lets you coast on what you already know; necessity forces you to assemble something new in real time. You don’t grow in the situations you’re prepared for — you grow in the ones you’re not.
Learning by osmosis
There’s another saying we grew up with: anda com bons, serás um deles; anda com maus, serás pior que eles. Walk with good people and you’ll become better than them; walk with bad ones and you’ll become worse than they are.
So much of what we learn, we absorb by osmosis. We watch the people around us and quietly copy their behaviors — their standards, their shortcuts, their way of handling pressure. We become an average of the room we’re standing in.
This is why who you surround yourself with is a decision, not an accident. If you want to be better, stand next to people who are already better, and let osmosis do the work theory can’t.
Protect them, or let them fail?
There’s the old proverb everyone knows: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. We all nod along to it — and then do the exact opposite the moment someone struggles, because handing over the fish is faster, cleaner, and feels like helping.
The instinct is to protect people from failure — to catch the mistake before it lands, to step in, to fix it quietly so nobody gets hurt. It feels like kindness. But if no one is born knowing, and the wall is what teaches, then shielding people from the wall is also shielding them from learning. Solving the problem for them feeds them today and leaves them just as helpless tomorrow.
The alternative is giving them the freedom to be wrong. Not recklessly — but enough room that the lesson actually lands. A mistake survived is worth more than a mistake prevented. Protecting people too much keeps them dependent on you forever, which feels great for your ego and terrible for their growth. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do for someone is put them slightly out of their depth — and then resist the urge to rescue them too soon.
Separate the important from the accessory
Which brings me to another piece of inherited wisdom: separar o trigo do joio — to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Our time is finite. We don’t get more of it by working harder, and we certainly don’t get more by drowning in the chaff — the small, loud, satisfying-to-finish tasks that feel like progress and produce none.
The trick I’ve found is to keep asking myself one question before doing anything: what’s the delta in value of doing this? Not whether it’s useful in the abstract — almost everything is useful in the abstract — but how much it actually moves the needle compared to not doing it at all. Most of the chaff doesn’t survive that question.
You have to learn to separate the wheat from the chaff, and then have the stomach to put your limited time where it actually matters. No one is born knowing how to do this either. You learn it the same way you learn everything else: by getting it wrong, watching people who get it right, and slowly absorbing the difference.
The real thing university teaches you
If you zoom out, all of this points to a single skill — and it’s not the one printed on the diploma. There’s a Portuguese saying for it: vivendo e aprendendo — living and learning, the idea that you never actually stop.
University doesn’t really teach you accounting, or algorithms, or whatever your degree said on the cover. The content is mostly obsolete by the time you need it. What it actually teaches you, if you’re paying attention, is how to learn — how to walk into a subject you know nothing about and come out the other side understanding it.
That’s the only skill with a long shelf life, and it’s exactly what Ivo Bernardo was pointing at with his ceiling. The world keeps changing, and your job role will keep changing with it — sometimes without you moving at all. The specific things you know today have an expiration date (especially now, when the job market is being turned upside down); the ability to learn the next thing doesn’t. Learning to learn is the one competence that compounds across every wall you’ll hit, every uncomfortable room you’ll be dropped into, every version of your job that hasn’t been invented yet.
Nobody is born knowing. But that’s the good news — vivendo e aprendendo, everyone is still allowed to learn. And the people who keep learning the longest are the ones who win.
This article was written with help from an LLM.