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I swear sometimes I have the intelligence of a potato.
We are idiots now, we have been idiots in the past, and we will be idiots again in the future – and that is OK. There aren’t any other available options for human beings.
- The School of Life
We are idiots by nature, regardless of intelligence. In his book How Will You Measure Your Life, Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen talked about his peers that excelled in their professional lives, but were unhappy in their personal lives. These were some of the brightest minds in the world. They never planned to be divorced, estranged with their children, or land into jail. Yet they did.
How can we use our idiocy to our advantage?
😳 Gaining vulnerability
Vulnerability can be a bad thing. Indeed, we keep our distress and weaknesses to ourselves because we all have a biologically ingrained sense of self-preservation to prevent others from exploiting us. Not only that, we might have the experience of opening up too much about our fears, sadness, and anxiety that drove people away. No one likes a party-pooper.
I see vulnerability as a tool. Vulnerability at the proper time helps us develop deep and lasting friendships, business partnerships, and mentors that will radically change the direction of our lives. The most life-changing knowledge and advice that I've gotten were when I allowed myself to be an idiot.
Putting yourself in a slightly vulnerable position also gives you skin in the game. Skin in the game means being involved in the success or failure of something, which forces us to pay more attention.
👊 Gaining confidence
It's quite difficult to show idiocy, especially when we've trained ourselves over the years to hide it. Teachers expect us to know stuff just by reading some textbook, parents expect a valid reason for our mistakes when really it was just because we brainlessly did something without much thought.
But think about it. As people open up about their idiocy, it tends to open up our curiosity more than our contempt for them. If my friends talk about how they are on a dating app flirting with someone in a different country that is twice their age, I would certainly have a good laugh and prompt them to continue with their various stories.
The same applies for us. The more we are comfortable with our idiocy and mindlessness, the less we fear the potential for failure, and the more confident we become when trying new things.
Of course, going into something with the intent to fail isn't right, but if the risk to reward ratio is worth it, then the time and resources spent won't be wasted even if we fail.
A project can be worth our time, even when the final outcome is failure.
🌏 Gaining perspective
Acknowledging that we are idiots can allow us to gain perspective on the bigger picture, and prevent us from ignoring black swans.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes black swans as extremely rare unpredictable events that have an extremely severe impact. Even though they have a very low probability of ever happening, it shouldn't be ignored because if it ever does happen, it would shake the very foundations of our lives.
Black swan events include the assassination of one Archduke Ferdinand that led to World War I. And the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that caused the financial markets to crash, resulting in a $1.4 trillion loss of market value. No one saw that coming, but it still hit like a truck.
Future black swans include: hearing a passing comment or advice that radically changes our direction in life. Any slight movement in Satoshi Nakamoto's cryptocurrency wallet would cause huge market crashes. The start of World War III with nuclear weaponry would mean that we have greater things to worry about than our school grades or income.
We must acknowledge that we are idiots, that we often see the world using normal bell curves that ignore outliers. Yet the truth is that almost every major advancement in our personal lives, in technology, and even the biological evolution of life occur as shocks and jumps. Out of the millions of decisions in our lives, there are only a handful of them that has a severe impact on the course of our lives. We shouldn't be too confident in our decisions without taking into account the unexpected.
The point is not to predict black swans, simply because they are defined as intrinsically unpredictable. The point is to produce robustness, and even antifragility against black swans (I highly recommend the books written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 🤯)
Conclusion
Knowing that we are idiots can help us gain vulnerability and to use it to our advantage, as deep and lasting friendships often start from an event revolving around some form of vulnerability.
Knowing that we are idiots can help us overcome the fear of the potential for failure, and give us confidence to try new things and to take up responsibility. Who knows? Maybe one of our failed projects may teach us an extremely valuable lesson down the line. Again, a project can be worth our time, even when the final outcome is failure.
Knowing we are idiots can help us gain perspective, knowing that the standard bell curve that we use in school really only apply to very few things in life. This world is instead dominated by Pareto distributions. It will help us develop robustness and antifragility, two of the most important traits for surviving the longest in this volatile world.
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