You’re The Smartest (and you know it)

Daily Meditation #388–3/20/2023

Even when you ARE the smartest (like a professor), you cannot allow your knowledge and understanding to blind you to possibilities of understanding your knowledge via lenses of others’ perceptions.

Here’s an uncomfortable couple facts.

You’re the smartest person in the room.
You need to be the dumbest person in the room.

On the first one — that’s probably how most of us perceive ourselves.
If we believe ourselves to be the “smartest” in the room, well, unfortunately we’re probably not. In fact, we may be the most Narcissistic in the room, blind to our ignorance.

On the second — why on Earth would you want to be the smartest person in any room?
Is the masturbation of our ego so important?
If you are the smartest, well, you’re probably bored.

We need to seek out dissenting ideas and opinions, thoughts that rub us the wrong way and make us think, understand, and consider.

Otherwise, we’re stagnating.

We don’t need to agree, but we ought to understand.

For concepts, we should seek things just beyond our understanding and then try to seek grasp it through the lens of that which we do already understand.

So, don’t be the smartest person in the room. You aren’t growing that way.

Seek to be (and be okay with being) the dumbest in the room.

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These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”