Content

Everyone is smart at whatever it is they are investing most of their time in, regardless of what the activity is.

Hawthorne Effect

tl;dr: The Hawthorne Effect Perhaps could get introduced here if it isn’t already.

In this chapter the intent would be to explain that the Hawthorne effect is how we stabilize our actions around an idea about ourselves.

It is how the sword gets forged, beaten through time, and hardened and sharpened.  The perspective you take in any situation is an additional beating of the hammer that brings your life into fruition.  Extreme perspectives yield actions that are, at most, as extreme as the thoughts that brought them about.  

Present the iceberg model and relate it to tacit and explicit knowledge and how our thoughts operate in a similar way relative to our actions.  Our actions are what is visible about who we are but what gets exposed on the surface is a result of the context it is percolating from.  

If you don’t understand all of the contexts through which your intelligence, the safe where your brain stores the lessons we choose to learn for ourselves with each tiny decision we make about how we will behave in the face of our wants, needs, successes, failures, and pain.  Our brains do this because our brains are wired for survival and will direct you to take actions to protect the ego at all costs.  

Our egos are important because of how they help us do what we want most but they also hurt us in the process of trying to protect itself from attack.  I do not think that people fear public speaking insomuch as being observed, because as the Hawthorne Effect works you are forced to stabilize the person you are being with the actions you are taking and having integrity is hard.  Having integrity is hard during times our minds are trying to protect the things bringing it joy and that is where our controlling behaviors emerge.  

Types of Intelligence

tl;dr - people put through rigid, traditional schooling programs are forced to think and act in a way that doubts and diminishes their self efficacy.  This causes us to doubt we will ever be able to accomplish what we want for ourselves and failing becomes an easier 

Maybe present it as a pie chart to represent that you have all these things and 100% of your intelligence is split into these things.

Intelligence is Applied Through Efficacy

Efficacy is everything

Efficacy is the ability to produce a desired outcome or result, and it’s the essential ingredient of effective self-help literature. The truth about most situations is that we already know what will make them better. Whether it’s a lifestyle problem or an emotional issue, the steps to a desired result can usually be found quite easily. What’s missing, what stops people from taking those steps, is the belief that they will work.

It’s easy to see why this is the case – if you’re currently in a deep hole then it’s difficult to imagine being on top of a mountain. If your problem has made you feel in some way powerless (physically, financially, emotionally) then the belief that you have the power to change your situation can feel at best optimistic and at worst constantly contradicted by reality.

Efficacy is the belief that your goals are reachable – both that the result you want is possible, and that you as an individual can achieve it. This is the quality that great self-help or philosophical texts must possess. Yes, they should include the practical steps a person needs to help themselves, but they also need to make those steps feel manageable and make the reader feel energized and capable.

There are lots of ways to build efficacy, I’ll be exploring them in the rules below, but make no mistake: that is the ultimate goal of this kind of writing. The surprising thing is that self-help book readers know this, and hunt out books which look approachable, practical and useable.

Developing Self Efficacy

tl;dr - If you want to become a swordmaster, you need to earn your chops. People before you have come from worse, gone through worse, and came out better than you have.  Aspire to be better than what your emotions are telling you to do.

Direct Exposure

Being Shown

Being Coached

Viewing Others as Stupid

tl;dr - We unkowingly create stories that help us justify why we are right and therefore everyone around us is stupid when we put them into a specific box to validate your thinking.  We end up missing out on the opportunity to learn something if we act like everyone around us has learned lessons worth sharing, because we do.  Even if the lesson we learn from an interaction is understanding how someone could go their entire life without knowing a specific fact or pattern of thinking you do, then that is a lesson in humility that will enable a more effective approach with the people you are working with.

While writing this book, I remarked about what I would say for this in a work setting where I experienced coworkers who were joking about how ridiculous some of the errors some people had been making were.  It frustrated me so much I got up and walked out of the meeting just to go to another coworker to talk about how ridiculous it was that these people didn’t see how disrespectful it was to talk about others like it was stupid, only to realize I was in turn doing the same thing.

I may have been talking about others being insensitive but I myself was being self righteous and spoon feeding my ego exactly what it wanted.  It sought what it wanted, which is to tend to the our basest desires of being right or enough and choosing to leave that situation to self-validate my experience of the world as a victim of hearing mean things instead of choosing to push against the discomfort and call out the situation more plainly than I had chosen before leaving.