I’m writing this blog out of curiosity, sitting in a beautiful café in Copenhagen, Denmark. For many reasons, I’ve been coming to Denmark every single year for more than half a decade. I’ve even written a blog about it before.

Yesterday, I was hanging out with some friends. We had all gathered in Copenhagen for a mutual friend’s wedding. I was talking to a friend who is early in his entrepreneurship journey, and while talking about his struggles, he said something that I haven’t stopped thinking about since.

“Rakhi, we all have to pay our ignorance debt.”

He explained but the sentence stuck. I kept thinking about it over and over again. What does that even mean? Why does it feel so true? What does it mean to me.

I think I’m a curious person by nature. So, of course, I started digging. I read blogs, watched videos, and tried to make sense of what this “ignorance debt” really is.

We’ve all heard the phrase ignorance is bliss but ignorance debt was new to me. And yet, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

I came across someone explaining it in a way that hit even deeper. What I understood from their blog is that ignorance debt is not just about what you don’t know, it’s the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Not in terms of money, but in knowledge, awareness, and purpose.

If you want to make a certain amount of money or reach a specific goal, it’s easy to focus on the outcome. But what’s really holding you back is usually what you don’t know yet. That difference, they said, is your ignorance debt. You pay it off by learning, growing, experimenting, trying again.

That clicked for me.

I started reflecting on all the ways I’ve unknowingly paid my own version of this ignorance debt. In the long routes I took just because I didn’t know there was a simpler way. In the times I felt stuck, not because I lacked effort, but because I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I guess that kind of debt doesn’t show up all at once. You don’t even realise you’re paying it until something clicks.

I’m a resourceful person(or at least I think so, and a few folks in my life have said that to me). I find my way around things. I ask questions, I figure stuff out. But when I heard the phrase “ignorance debt,” it gave a name to something I’ve been doing all along without realising it.

And just like financial debt, I think this kind of debt builds slowly. Every time we stick with what's familiar or avoid asking a question out of fear of sounding stupid, we might be adding to it. The longer we wait to face what we don’t know, the more it compounds, not just in missed knowledge, but in how long it takes to grow into the person we’re trying to become.

This realization feels different. I think it’s going to change the way I look at my struggles in life, in work, or in anything that feels genuinely hard. Every time I am struggling or will struggle with something, I will remind myself that this is me paying the ignorance debt, and I’m just going to get better from here.