Ignorance never realizes its own incompetence, is arrogant, thinks she is an expert and overestimates her abilities with brilliant pride: she assumes that she knows everything, on the other hand, intelligent people question the most, are insecure and take more humble gaze, able to understand that in this world nothing can be taken for granted.
Bertrand Russell said that the problem with this life is that stupid people are always confident and bright people full of doubts, somehow this would explain why those who succeed are not always the most prepared or intelligent, many of the most responsible. and the important positions of our society are held, on average, by the most incompetent, with low-skilled profiles, but with high management capacity.
“Ignorance generates more confidence than knowledge. ” – Charles Darwin-
A BBC documentary entitled The Problem of Intelligent People highlighted a surprising fact: if mediocrity is the one that succeeds in our society it is because it fully trusts its limited knowledge and knows how to “sell it”. a guru when it comes to making himself known. In the modern business world, we are all required, in a way, to be promoters of ourselves and, in fact, we just need to take a look at LinkedIn resumes to see how many profiles appear.
Smarter people, on the other hand, don’t even feel comfortable talking about themselves, they don’t see themselves as specialists, they don’t have the firm determination of the ignorant, and they focus more on what they don’t yet know than what they already master with great skill.
In 2012 McArthur Wheeler had planned the blow of his life, he would rob the Pittsburgh bank, to do so he had the magic formula: lemon juice, when he came to the bank with his big bag ready to carry all the money. in the safe, something went wrong. The police were chasing him. Young Wheeler could not understand, he was angry, almost indignant, but I am invisible!He says it over and over again.
The story of this American took little time to go around the world, McArthur Wheeler was firmly convinced that if he spilled lemon juice on him, he would become invisible so he could achieve his feat. Errol Morris, the journalist who covered the news and interviewed him, couldn’t help but admire the man’s great conviction. Apart from the presence of a psychological disorder, what characterized this unfortunate thief was his personal safety, his firmness.
His stupidity, the journalist said, protected him from the conscience of his own stupidity. This curious story also describes the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias by which some people with few cognitive abilities show an illusory sense of superiority. , considered even smarter than others. Moreover, despite erroneous conclusions and unfortunate decisions, their incompetence deprives them of the metacognitive capacity to realize the truth.
Smart people question more, question everything that is involved and what has happened, everything others say and even what they think, this, in principle, can lead them to acquire stronger knowledge, but it is also a big drawback. It will be more difficult to make a concrete decision, and if there is one thing we all know is that we live in a reality where the capacity for reaction prevails, where there is no room for thoughtful reflection, where we have to move from analysis to action in less than a second.
Charles Darwin himself mentioned it in his book “Descend of Man”. He complained that his contemporaries demanded quick answers to all the questions he had posed in his theories. Knowledge takes time and attention to detail, he argued. Truth is not revealed in a day or two, it can take a lifetime.
However, as we know, today we cannot wait a lifetime to be able to position ourselves, improve our professional career, because one way or another we all know bright people who have not yet achieved their goals, even dramatic cases where exceptional profiles are relegated as clearly incompetent individuals, so let’s see what strategies or approaches should be applied to move forward.
We know that smart people ask more questions, so what’s the secret?Maybe you’ll stop asking yourself questions? There is no way simply a question of reorienting one’s perception.
In conclusion, perseverance and determination are the best allies of intelligent people who have not yet found their space for expansion, let’s add a little ingenuity and have the perfect combination to succeed over mediocrity, to stand up to opportunism that lacks real talent.