I've come to the conclusion that in the English language, three words can be deemed the most important and powerful. There are thousands upon thousands of words, and these three are the most potent a human will ever say.

"I don't know."

Frankly, there are few who have the guts to say these words anymore. To say them is to acknowledge personal shortcomings, and in my estimation, that's an especially brave thing to do.

It took a long time for me to learn how to say them, too. As someone who prides himself, sometimes too much, on his knowledge of certain subjects, it was really difficult for me to learn how to say them. It still suffers a bit of resistance as it comes out my throat.

Really, the scope of what each of us individually knows is infinitely small when one considers the grand scheme of things. Even seasoned scholars in ivy halls still know so little in comparison to all the knowledge of the world. You could spend your whole life learning, reading and studying and ultimately you would still fall so short of all there is to know.

Even beyond a scope of concrete knowledge, however, these three words are supremely powerful. I long to hear them in political debate or just day-to-day discussion of current events between people. It makes me cringe so often when I see someone trying to scramble to sound informed and intelligent on an issue they barely understand or have never even heard of.

For all of 2016 presidential candidate Gary Johnson's (Libertarian Party) incompetence and apparent inability to defeat two of the worst candidates in history, one moment of his during the election stood out to me.

He was asked a question at a press conference during the campaign to which he obviously did not know the answer. The question was concerning the Syrian civil war, and what he would do as president about Aleppo, a focal point in the conflict from which thousands of refugees have flooded.

When asked the question, he simply replied, "What's Aleppo?"

Nevermind the fact that this presidential candidate was unaware of a major foreign affairs issue; what we can learn from this is that it's okay to concede that you don't understand something (and the majority of us will not run for the presidency). The typical politician route would have been to make some kind of a general statement in an attempt to conceal their own ignorance on the matter.

More relatable to the rest of us, Jimmy Kimmel used to have a segment of his show called "Lie Witness News", in which he would interview people on the streets about issues that sounded real, but were entirely fictitious. The people featured in the montage would stutter to formulate an "informed" opinion on these issues, often agreeing with facts the interviewer would casually drop.

For instance, one featured a fake proposed bill that would move Independence Day to February, and people were asked to give their opinions on this. One man disagreed with the idea, claimed his friends had been talking about it recently (not true), and when the interviewer said, "yeah because that's the day the Magna Carta was signed in America" (not true), the man said, "yeah, totally".

What made Lie Witness News so funny was we could all see ourselves in the uninformed people stammering to look intelligent. We've all been guilty of this.

But the thing about this is once you admit you don't know or understand something, you've freed yourself of your ignorance. You no longer have to play a kind of charade, while remaining mired in your lack of understanding. You can move past both of these things, and speaking from my own experience, it's liberating.

So learn to say these three words more often:

"I don't know."