Prompted: Hungry & Foolish
Intelligence isn't what we think it is.
Hungry & Foolish
Imagine trying to learn Chinese. Months of flashcards and struggle, but still nowhere near fluent. A native speaker of the language walks past you speaking perfect Chinese. Are they smarter than you? Of course not.
The environment of the native speaker's life gave them a decades-long head start. They were immersed in the language from birth.
We often conflate expertise with intelligence, but they are not the same.
If you grew up in Shanghai, you’d have no trouble speaking Chinese. Even if you started learning the language at a younger age or committed to a more robust learning regiment, you would have learned the language faster, but your intelligence is still the same.
The same can be said of other skills. Folks working in customer-facing roles often idolize the intelligence of engineers or mathematicians, and the engineers and mathematicians marvel at the natural skill customer-facing teams have for navigating conversations.
If they switched places at the beginning of their careers, how much better would each group be at something they don’t think they can ever do?
The salespeople didn’t have an innate talent for conversation from the moment they were born. Instead, they slowly cultivated and developed the skills over years of exposure, focus, and intentional practice. The same goes for engineers and mathematicians.
Intelligence and talent are not what we think they are. Of course, there are a handful of geniuses and anomalies, but most of what we consider intelligence comes from time, environment, and commitment. Each of these is a lever to improve in any field.
Immerse yourself in anything for a significant amount of time with a strong commitment to learn, and results will follow. Most of us see people accomplishing amazing feats and think, “I could never get to that point”. We compare our beginner capabilities to experts and become discouraged. But a handful of people look at the small monotonous things that extraordinary folks do every day and think, “I could probably do that”.
After a year, the first group stays in the same place because they’re scared of the result, and the second group accomplishes something fantastic because they were okay looking foolish at the start.
As humans, we like to do things that we’re good at, but this leads to stagnation. Challenging ourselves to try new things and become a beginner again drives us to expand our knowledge and perspective. If we recognize that we’ll get better in everything we try our hand at, over time we develop can expertise across many disciplines.
The humility to be a beginner combined with the hunger to accomplish great things feeds our desire to become a bit better each day and allows us to accomplish things in the future that seem impossible today.
Prompts
In what areas of my life am I a beginner? If none, why is that?
What skills or accomplishments do I see as insurmountable? What small daily action would get me closer to that end state?
What I am really good at? Do I rely on that skill too much?
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.
Kevin