You Are Probably Not As Intelligent As You Think You Are

This is something that I had to come to terms with as a young man, eager to climb up the ladder of greatness. It struck me like a one tonne sledgehammer at the time, right in the temple of the forehead, crumbling my world and my sense of self all around me.

Realising something like this can be both very freeing, yet also very upsetting.

Most people will go through life never wondering how intelligent they are, or if they are anything like I was as a young man – which was full of himself and thought of himself as a bit of a deity then they’ll stroll through life thinking that their intelligence levels are unparalleled.

Of course I used to tell other people that I didn’t think that I was hugely intelligent, I mean it’s not socially acceptable to walk around saying that you have the intelligence equivalence of Einstein, which to confirm now I do not, but back then I absolutely thought this was me. Or close to it at least. I used to get lost in a dream world where I would be solving some new problem that puzzled the worlds greatest and brightest minds.

Delusions of grandeur. This was me.

Many people who know me, or knew me back when I was a young man may be surprised by this admission (or may not), but this is something I think plagues a lot of the youth today (and many, many years, and millennia beforehand); it’s only the time spent in this world and the experiences we craft within it that has us fall from our towers of omnipotence.

My defining moment was around six months after I stopped drinking alcohol. It dawned on me around then as I was immersing myself in new and interesting experiences that I didn’t know much about this world at all. That my energy had been spent on finding ways and means to get my next glass of vodka or gin, that I hadn’t stopped at all to appreciate the interesting things around me, and it was quite telling because everything was very new to me.

I almost felt like a child in a mans body. In fact this is how I described it to my peers who were helping me in my transition. I remember sitting in a private room with the woman that helped me on my journey, explaining to her that most of my life was lived as a lie. The self illusion I had crafted for myself, that I was this intelligent awesome person to be around was nothing more than a mask to cover up what I truly was — a little boy who was too scared to show the world who he really was in case they judged him for it.

It was the defining moment from there of course. Knowing that I was still young in the mind I set about a journey to discover who I was, what I liked, and how I wanted to go out and experience the world. It was not without its pitfalls though, of course, I’m no beacon of perfection, and mishaps and missteps are aplenty along the way, and are still with me now.

“To err is human” ~ Alexander Pope

I often laugh when I see people share the “Dunning Kruger” graph on Facebook because I know how misused and misrepresented this is. Mostly everyone experiences the Dunning Kruger effect to some degree on life in general. Yes, I am no exception.

The basis of this can be applied to every facet of life, and, even to life itself.

It’s mostly often applied to Politics though (where I have seen it used), and used to bash the other Political aisle for their lack of awareness on the topics they are talking about. I’ve seen both sides use it, and almost always it’s misused. One could even argue that stating the other side suffers from the Dunning Kruger effect is in itself overestimating your own competence on such issues.

This is a wildly different story for a day way in the future.

What I was getting at though, is that even although I was lying to myself I was also wildly overestimating my competence in lots of areas because of the illusion that I had created for myself. I’m not sure but I feel this is something people do on the whole. There is the illusory self, and the real self, and most people keep the real self locked away because the brain doesn’t like negativity / pain and it will do anything to run away from the pain and negativity — so much so that you create an illusionary self.

The illusionary self can (is mostly) the self you create that you imagine other people like, or you want the world to see. This self can often been seen doing jobs for people whilst secretly loathing the fact that you have been taken away from other things that you love and enjoy to help a friend or a neighbour out with a favour. The illusory self will also give thanks to those it doesn’t like. It’s like a protection system for the ego that doesn’t want to be seen in a certain negative way. It doesn’t like to be seen as a bad person.

And this stems from childhood, and is a sort of child-like way to manage the world. Do good things that you don’t necessarily want to do, and get good rewards for it (your mum or dad might have taught you this paradigm). But life isn’t like that, and it’s far more complex, especially in adulthood, and it’s why people can find themselves angry, frustrated, and sometimes a bit overwhelmed. It’s when the illusory self meets with the real self. What one wants, and does for those wants, the end result can often not be as planned. As I was often finding as a young adult.

But ever since my ego was sliced in half by the self realisation that I probably wasn’t anywhere near as intelligent as I thought I went onto a quest to find answers. And not just some answers, but all and every answer. My manager used to tell me, assume nothing, and question everything. I think this is a great life principle to live your life by. People are blank slates when they meet me and we foster relationships from there depending on how they treat me. I like to learn about people and things in general.

Yet interestingly I didn’t honestly realise how unintelligent I was until I met my wife. She in comparison to me is like a pinnacle, a sear, a fountain of knowledge. When we first started dating and I told her I always wanted to read and understand Hamlet, she would recite it word for word to me (stopping at each part I didn’t understand) before we went to sleep at night. You should see our amazon book-list. There are hundreds and hundreds of books in there and she’s read all of them. Even now, I am but a mere speck on her massive intellectual prowess, although I’m fast catching up with my YouTube documentaries / thinktank discussions playlists.

Meeting my wife showed me what was possible. That there was a whole another world out there. That I had been squandering my potential on meaningless things, and through her I learned that the world is abundant with so much information and interesting things.

And through that I’ve realised once again that I don’t know much at all.

Socrates once said:

“I am the wisest man alive, because I know one thing, and that is I know nothing”

Meaning there is just too much to know and understand, and in the grand scheme of it all, I am but a blemish, on a huge tree of vast knowledge.

So I might think I know lots of things, but in reality, and on the whole, I don’t know much at all.

Freshly pressed today, on my blog, here: https://happymindthrive.com/you-are-probably-not-as-intelligent-as-you-think-you-are/