Weekly Review: July 22, 2022

Hello.

I'm away on vacation this week - at the beach for my wife's family reunion - so this week's format is different.

I'm only going to share one article with you this week:

Teaching Smart People How To Learn.

See, if you read this blog, you're probably fairly smart. You might not feel that smart on the inside, but people have told you you're smart for a good chunk of your life.

If that's the case, then I highly suggest you read the article above.

See: that article changed my life.

It forced me to realize that being told your smart creates a problem:

You become ego-invested in your self-image as a smart person.

Nothing wrong with feeling smart, of course. Or liking the attention.

The problem starts when you start to suspect you might be wrong about something.

Maybe a meeting doesn't go well, or no one wants to publish your book, or your weekly blog is trite and meandering and you slowly hemmhorage subscribers for a straight year.

Or, you know. Whatever. Those are just random examples.

Whatever the context, being wrong puts your self-image as a smart person in jeopardy. After all, you can't be that smart if you were wrong, right?

When our self-images are put in jeopardy, we marshall our defenses...and the defenses of smart people are impressive, indeed.

This defensiveness in the face of being wrong makes it harder for us to learn...which guarantees we will be wrong again soon. That makes us even more defensive, and on and on until we're all walled up in a fortress of our own ignorance, masquerading as "open-mindedness" and "liberality" and "intelligence."

Not that I would know anything about that, of course. This is all highly theoretical.

In any case, read the link above. You'll like it. I'm sure you'll be able to think of a friend or two who might benefit from reading it.

Not you, of course. But other people.

Love,

Dan