Introspection Quotient (IQ)

Thursday morning musing...

I call it introspection quotient (IQ). It is the ability to see ourselves more clearly, for who we really are. It also involves seeing ourselves through the eyes of others. 

You see, knowing ourselves is good. But it doesn’t stand alone. Taking positive feedback from others and being willing to change for the better runs in parallel to knowing ourselves. It is called knowing what others think of us and processing it to improve ourselves. 

The better we are with such introspection skills the less self-delusional we will be. Together, they form what I would call “self-awareness”. 

So, there is an inverse relationship between self-awareness and self-delusion. The more self-aware we are, the less self-deluded we are. Conversely, the less self-aware we are, the more self-deluded we are.

When we are less self-deluded, we come off as more appealing to others. We are able to connect better with people, and on a deeper, more authentic level, because they don’t see us as a snob or as aloof, smug, arrogant, self-conceited, inauthentic, hypocritical, and for some, just plain incorrigible.

Ultimately, it is all about an accurate assessment of ourselves, so that we do not build an edifice of self, thereby erecting a cult around it. That’s going to one extreme. 

There is also the other extreme resulting in the destruction of self, where we see nothing good in ourselves, nothing redeemable. That can lead to suicide, an exiled path to self-oblivion. 

So, life is about taking the middle road. That’s the road where we think neither the world of ourselves nor the worst of ourselves. When properly aligned, we think just right about ourselves.

Come to think of it, a whole philosophy can be built upon that when it comes to developing our introspection quotient. It’s simply called the philosophy of...don’t get ahead of yourself. 

Think of a distortion lens that we carry with us, instead of a self-examining mirror, and wherever we go, in all situations, we see ourselves through that lens. Reality is thus distorted for us. 

Like infants of maturity, we disproportionalise everything. Every success puffs us up. Every adulation augments our ego. And every title achieved, every ambition secured, inflates our self up with a sense of epic-ness unmatched and unrealistic by all measures. 

It’s like we have no inner self-filter to separate the wheat from the tares, or the substance from the hot air. 

We thus become hoarders of praises, social media ”Likes“ and followership. Inevitably, we become self-obsessed and self-absorb, naturally getting “ahead” of ourselves because our head is so big and heavy, it literally droops in front of us. 

Alas, Josh Billing was right when he said: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” 

Underscore “for sure” because most times our attitude of inerrant certainty leads to a fate of immodest calamity. 

Let me end with these words by neuroscientist VS Ramachandran. 

“Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars. Apes live, contend, breed and die in forests - end of story. Human write, investigate, and quest. We splice genes, split atoms, launch rockets. We peer upward...and delve deeply into the digits of pi. Perhaps most remarkably of all, we gaze inward, piercing together the puzzle of our own unique and marvellous brain...This, truly, is the greatest mystery of all.”

Indeed, that is the greatest mystery of all. And the last frontier to explore is not (so much) outer space, but our innermost world. And that journey starts not with what we think we know for sure, but what we know for sure that we don’t know. 

For isn’t the beginning of knowledge the discovery of something we do not understand? Food for thot? Cheerz. 

(Source: Insight - The Power of Self-Awareness in a Self-Deluded World by author Tasha Eurich).