Hello everyone, hope this article finds you doing well. Firstly, big shoutout to all of the new follows and people that have been showing support, I really appreciate ya. I’d like to ask you all, to leave some comments or feedback somewhere of the type of content that you’ve found most valuable and perhaps what you’d like to see more of from me. That will help me to gauge what sort of stuff is really resonating with you guys but also allow me to understand why. That said, let’s jump into today’s article.
In my pursuit of generating interesting content one thing that I’ve been thinking about more lately is the concept of unseen habits and thought-frameworks that can create more resistance than necessary in our progress. One such thing that I’ve been thinking about quite a lot, and an area that’s been a long interest of mine, is the relationship between the way in which we talk about IQ, intelligence, wisdom and things revolving in that sphere of topics and personal success. To start with the main one IQ, while I’m not going to get into the weeds of how I think IQ can be a misleading and difficult to understand metric for measuring human intelligence and consequently success particularly in certain industries, I would like to speak on the greater dialogue around IQ for a moment.
Probably the primary thing that makes IQ a useful starting point to get into self-limiting mindset stuff, is that it’s one of those things that is considered both static, and yet fluid, extremely important, and yet irrelevant. In other words, the absurd amount of contradiction in the landscape of IQ makes it very difficult to understand what’s going on or take it seriously. Rather than have a rigorous and long-term, data driven assessment of people’s intelligence using IQ measurement, we generally look at the achievements or the field of various figures, assess the thickness of their glasses, and then pull a magic number out of our asses as to what their IQ must approximately be. I needn’t go into how this is not very helpful or scientific, but isn’t it a tad strange that we pretend to know the approximate IQ’s of Albert Einstein, Issac Newton, Bill Gates and other figures when they likely have not taken anything approximating a rigorous set of IQ tests? The focus of this piece is not on IQ, but the reason I bring this to attention is because it makes little sense to rate ourselves in our potential, or affinity for math, computer science or physics via a series of tests few have actually taken. Taking a 15 minute, Facebook IQ test, is not a great way of ranking yourself among your peers. The other major problem, that I will be brief in mentioning, is that measuring of IQ does little to assess potential or the quality of the thinking that someone does. In other words, as we can probably agree, because success comes from asking and grappling with a handful of very wise questions and not from haphazardly addressing 1000, success beyond a mediocre approximation can’t be connected very well with IQ the way it is usually understood.
Leaving IQ aside, my suggestion that I’ve arrived at through a lot of study and thought on the subject, is that in order to actually improve our lives we must focus on measuring that which will most move the needle. What are the things we can significantly affect, and measure reasonably well, that will have the greatest positive impact on our lives? I ask these sorts of questions on this blog often, because I think it’s super important, not to naively assume we can fly if we flap our arms hard enough, but to actually focus on acting to create positive changes through what we do control. IQ to my mind is not a hopeless concept in it’s entirety, but I sense focusing on it, as I once did, is an incredibly dead-end way of determining how to grow your investment pie, get in shape, spend more quality time with family, or do any of the things that actually enrich our lives. There are a great number of things that we tell ourselves and that are socially reinforced that never really help us to achieve anything. Many people have talked about this sort of stuff before me so I’ll not drone on about it here, but stories that we are lazy, or are procrastinators, or not good at math, music or art, are often self-fulfilling and self- defeating. The logic that suggests you essentially get the outcomes you sign up for is not magical but comes from, in my experience, the observation that we must have the confidence and the audacity to not disqualify ourselves from success and opportunity. As I’ve been learning and working on much more myself recently, if we never send the email or talk to someone for fear of rejection, silence or failure, we have stripped our own luck and chance at an opportunity before us.
As always I’m positive I could say more on this topic, but I will leave it here for now. if you found this useful, or thought-provoking I encourage you to leave a comment on 1 self-limiting story that you plan to retire.
Be Well,
Orion Aeneas Webster,
FourthEye Blog
FourthEye 
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