If you don't know about the Dunning Kruger effect, please go and look it up now then come back here. This post is not going to be about this concept but I believe it is a good primer to this because when I read about it, I instantly saw correlation in my own life and wanted to learn more....
Have you ever heard someone say "Don't quote me on this, but..." or have you ever had someone who's your age or younger give you life advice? If not, I hope you can imagine the latter at the very least. Like imagine your friend's son, who just finished high school, happened to pick up your resume that you left on the kitchen counter at their place. Before you leave, they come to return it to you and say "Hey I saw your resume, it looks good, but I think you should put a list of skills you are good at towards the top because it will show employers quickly what you are capable of."
Shit like this is what I used to do and it's super toxic. For a very long time, I kept doing it for a lot of reasons, but two really stood out to me:
- I was not open to reflecting on my own actions and introspecting on myself
- I was evaluating rather than observing
I believe these sorts of behaviours are a form of childish behaviour. It signals (to me at least) that you have a closed mind and are not capable of realising how insignificant and idiotic you actually are.
Now onto the topic. I really hope you did some basic science lessons in school because I'm about to talk a bit about the scientific method. In case you don't know, it goes something like this:
- You have a hypothesis (an existing assumption about how something works)
- You give yourself the opportunity to have an open mind
- You do everything that you can think of to disprove the hypothesis
- You observe the results
Everything here is important in helping you to know and feel that you are in fact stupider than you think. Allow me to explain...
Firstly, everything that you know is an assumption. Facts don't exist, they are just assumptions, and they get closer and closer to reality as you test them.
You can safely assume that 2+2=4, right? Yet that's still an assumption, you have to test it with something. So let's get some veggies!
I got 2 carrots and 2 onions. That makes 4 vegetables, right?
To you this might work, but Big Brain Billy over there says that "vegetables don't exist" (search it up, it's a fun read). So in his mind, there's just a collection of 4 bits of plants.
This is, what I like to call, your mental model. It's made up of all of the assumptions that you've learned over your entire life. All the knowledge that you gain by living, travelling, playing, conversing, and studying isn't actually valuable until it's battle-tested by actually implementing it and trying it out.
You need to open your mind to this concept of assumptions before you can make any progress. Each person will have a way to do this, and the way that made the most sense to me is understanding the difference between evaluation and observation.
I like explaining things with examples. Let's give it a shot...
Let's say you are walking along a path with a friend and you see a group of guys push one of their mates down a hill without them expecting it. The guy that got pushed is quite scrawny, shorter and smaller than the others. All the other guys are laughing.
You say to your friend "Man those guys are jerks!" (this is an evaluation).
What happens a few seconds later is another of the guys tackles another one in the group and rolls down with them. Soon they all start rolling down the hill because they all know each other well enough to be playful like that. Just bros being bros.
Instead of jumping to a quick conclusion, you should have observed: "Those guys just pushed that other guy down that hill and started laughing". That way there's curiousity. Please take a moment to really slow down and read that statement very carefully. Don't just skim through this, feel it! I used to have a bad habit of skimming stuff to pick up the most important information only, but never to actually feel what I was reading, and this is probably one of the most important things I'm going to write about here so please read it until you can feel the realness of that observation. It's completely unambiguous and totally direct. It's fresh.
So read that observation again. When you cease to judge, you'll have curiousity guide your thinking. You'll find questions like "Why did they push him?" and "Why are they laughing?" would come to mind. These are thought-provoking and grow your mind and understanding whereas the evaluation is limiting, it controls you and stops you from growing as a person. It sets in stone in your mind that these other people are morally beneath you and inflates your ego. It gives you no opportunity to question it unless you have the mental fortitude to continuously argue every little thing in your head. It also discourages you from interacting with those people and potentially becoming friends with them. Who knows, maybe they also like something you like doing.
Do this with everything.
Work is hard? That's an evaluation. Instead say "I did X, Y and Z at work today". You'll maybe realise that you are actually really happy with what you did and give yourself a bit of pride as a reward.
Co-worker wearing a cute dress? Don't tell them it's cute, instead say "Omg is that a puppy embroidered on your dress?" (but make sure to make a really high pitched voice to show your interest)
Said something wrong in a meeting? Don't say "I'm so stupid..." or "That was so embarrassing...", instead say "I was mispronouncing the company's new product name up until this dude mentioned it to me in that meeting today."
See how this does a few things?
- It keeps everything open-ended
- It keeps you curious
- It keeps you grounded to reality
- It acts as one step towards solving a problem
- You don't have to worry about being wrong because observation is objective
- You don't come off as judgemental, instead you come off as interested in understanding
- You start to communicate with yourself and others better because they don't feel like they are being judged
Keep your evaluations (assumptions) to yourself, and observe and test things in order to prove those assumptions wrong and come up with better ones.
Open your eyes, ears, and hands, and close your mouth.
Slow down your thoughts, don't say anything, don't think anything. Just pay total attention to the thing you want to observe. Closely look at how it's shaped, how it behaves, how it reacts to you doing things to it. Like literally imagine you are going to go blind tomorrow. Understand that beauty is only ever observed.
If you're like me, you'll get so caught up in the observation that you'll forget what other people are actually thinking because you are actually more obsessed with observing and trying to understand something rather than worrying about what other people think of you.
Then when you are so excited with what you just learned, don't go and tell people your assumption or evaluation. Tell them what you observed. You'll find that you'll be met with more curiousity and intrigue than if you were to broadcast a flat-out judgement.
So that was how you can realise your stupidity on your own. This is a comfy and cushy way of doing it because you get to take the stick. You control how much or how little you observe and you can tune it to your comfort (comfort is sometimes bad btw, but I'll explain in another post maybe).
Something that's really uncomfortable but will give you the same experience 100x faster is asking someone else for help. But you have to do it right for it to be effective.
I have another article called "How to ask for help" which goes into this in-depth so I recommend you also read that.
I think that's most of what I wanted to get across here.
This tool is one of the first things I learned in my mental health journey and I use it in practically everything I do now.
When you practice this tool, you need to feel it. You can't force this out of yourself. If the observation vs evaluation model doesn't feel like it works for you, then you need to find a different model that does. It's hard at first, but once you actually feel the feeling, you will know. And if you don't know how to "feel the feeling", then I recommend reading the article called "Labelling".
Sometimes what it will take is for you to do something and have things not turn out the way you expected, only to look back and realise that the feeling you had all along about this thing was actually a mask for your ignorance. Then you will figure out how to recognise this feeling in the future, then stop, take a step back, and realise "hey, I actually don't know... And that's ok..."