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In the early days of my participation in The Forum, back in the 80’s, the typical first few minutes were like this: A smartly dressed man or woman ran into the room yelling: for You Everything is the Same as Everything Else, Except that not always…
Stunned silence… who expected yelling… definitely not me! And what the heck does that even mean?!
Then right after he would yell: you have your shit together… yeah, that is all you have together, your shit!
And thus began the most transformative event of most participant’s life… Me included.
Where I found out that it was true: for me everything had been the same as everything else… I didn’t know what was the order of importance… so I had almost always started with what wasn’t important…
The order of things… what is first, what is second? What should I start, what should I stop? My todo list looked three pages long… and nothing much got ever done.
But as dramatic, as powerful, as eventful the Landmark Education Forum was, only about 1% experienced a lasting effect on their lives… The rest: yesterdays transformation is today’s arrogance! Why?
This article attempts to dig deep to see why only 1% of any course every makes a lasting effect…
If you look, putting things in order doesn’t seem too difficult… when it is by size, by color. Even a child can do that.
Especially if you can place the items next to one another…
But any other criteria: most people have trouble with that.
What do most people say when I suggest that they need to get smarter, that they need to take on a practice to increase their DNA capacities and their IQ.
The typical objections are:
who cares?
why is it important?
It’s hopeless.
It’s not hopeless. Humans are incredibly adaptable learning machines.
Playing chess regularly will open 10 new capacities. In the made for TV movie Knights of the South Bronx doesn’t say why, but the children who opted to invest their time in learning to play chess became smarter by virtue of opening up capacities that are needed to play chess…- Debating also builds some capacities.
- Reading books.
- Writing a summary or a thesis…
All these activities make you smarter.
It is known that smarter people do better in life… Although some really dumb people will ask the question: but do they have common sense?
Ultimately smart people have common sense, and the person who asks the question doesn’t. If that is you, you may want to quit while you are ahead.
But the most important reason you want to increase the number of capacities that work for you in life is because your aspirations, your ambitions call for that.
And when you live a life where you disappoint yourself is full of grief and hate.
You can start where you are at… by the way.
By the way, if you look, the discovery of genes active or not active in the context of thinking, being, anything other than health is about 50 years ahead of our times.
Scientists can’t even think that… but if you are one of my followers, you can.
What is new is that you cannot just pick a capacity willy nilly, a capacity that you like, and have it be functioning in your DNA, not even after I activate it.
Your life doesn’t need it.
If you are not a reader, not a chess player, don’t struggle with building a business, don’t struggle with trying to decide what is more important than something else… you won’t be able to keep any new capacity on…
In my HERO program I train members, assist them, occasionally do it for them… but ultimately a member’s job is to get from where they are at, intellectually, emotional intelligence-wise, skill-wise, to where they need to be to become the kind of person who can have their dream… and fulfill on it.
Until 1999 I had a magazine for 11 years. I started it and I did most of the work on it… But I needed support staff.
My interview method was not what you would expect, and it wasn’t very good either… but here you go:
I asked people to perform tasks that needed intellectual capacities, like organizing stuff in a drawer, or sorting stuff I got in the mail, or finding something I needed through the yellow pages… Yes, this was decades ago. There were computers, there was internet, but no search engines, yet.
So if and when you are having a difficulty designing a life, choosing between different things to do, or seeing what is more important than something else, you are not alone.
The common or shared capacity on which my interview tasks were based on is pattern recognition, one of the main elements of every IQ test I know.
Being able to see beyond the obvious, beyond the mundane, beyond the surface of things.
You can’t learn it without the DNA capacity. It is one single capacity, but it seems to be crucial to a successful life.
Average IQ people fail at that.
And because this capacity is needed to have and succeed at anything where you need to make choices based on patterns, importance, priority, if you have the ambition to have your own business, for example, you are sh!t out of luck, unless you can choose a partner who has this as his/her major strength… or have a ‘silent partner’, a coach, for example.
A full 99% of humanity lacks this DNA capacity… it only kicks in at or above 120 IQ, and even then not all at once, and not necessarily fully.
The reason I have been more than hesitant to coach business, or money, is exactly this lack.
If you can’t see it, you can’t see it. But couple that with the personality of arrogance, or willful, or resistant, and you have a perfect storm that will lead to disastrous results… The client failing, and you, the coach looking bad.
Question: What makes a coach successful?
The answer: The client sees what is being suggested and acts on it… implements it, succeeds with it.
So a coach’s success is not how much money they made in their own business, but how well they choose their clients.
What happens when the coach tells you what to do if you can’t compare things because you can’t see the essence of the difference, then your logical and natural reaction to someone who can see what you can’t?
Your reaction will be the same as your reaction to supernatural… Fear and hate. You’ll obey, but you don’t understand why you are doing what you are doing. You can’t see it. Or you refuse to do it, and hate the coach.
I have had my share of both. What I haven’t often experienced is someone SEEING my point and doing what there was to do because of that.
Can you, could you open up this capacity? Meaning: can you, could you increase your IQ?
Some time ago I wrote an answer in QUORA where I mentioned that I have increased my IQ by a lot… I got some hate mail… HATE mail.
I think hate is self-hate turned against another… redirected.
When you feel less, when you see that someone can do what you can’t even understand, you feel less. And feeling less is unpleasant. It reminds you of all the names you got as a child, all the struggles and fights where you didn’t win, all the times when you were excluded, not picked for the sports team… all the humiliation, abuse, put-down, bullying you had to endure.
And you turn all that emotional shit storm against your ‘opponent’. You turn it into hate against them.
Human base nature is determined by the selfish gene.
The selfish gene wants only one thing: to increase the proportion of itself in the gene pool. That means: it wants to procreate and a lot.
But there is competition: every person is the vehicle of their own genes, and every person’s selfish genes want the same thing: more progeny, more duplicates of itself.
And these ‘smart people’ are a threat to that desire. So are all the different people… different ethnicities…
The most important characteristics of the selfish gene is to hate and attack everyone else who doesn’t seem to make the fight for opportunities easier…
This has always been so.
Interestingly this same selfish gene doesn’t seem to want to work for what it wants. This wasn’t always so: otherwise that would have been no evolution of species…
In yesterday’s article I looked at the number of DNA capacities that were open and active 2000 years ago, compared to how many are open humanity-wide today.
It is going in the wrong direction. Most of us are dumber than our parents were… especially if they ‘helped’ us in school, crossing the street, or anywhere.
Even capacities that you were born with, inherited capacities turn off if and when you don’t use them because you don’t seem to need them.
One of the reasons dyslexic people, on average, do better in life, create successful companies is because the parent can’t help the child to overcome it even if there are methodologies to assist. It is the child who needs to overcome it…
There is a huge difference between help and support.
Using a weight training analogy: help is to lift half of the weight with the person we are helping. Support is spotting them, to make sure they don’t kill themselves in the process. But they are doing all the lifting… not the support person.
The same is true in everything: in school work…
Without struggle no growth can happen, without struggle you’ll atrophy, your muscles and your brain.
I wrote this article to give you a choice. Thus far you have had none.
IQ, what makes someone make more out of their lives, make better decisions, create more opportunities for achievement are all invisible… they are part of the capacity of pattern recognition.
Books about famous high achievers
Books about famous high achievers can only talk about the visible. And you read the books and you try to emulate what those famous people did, and it doesn’t work for you, or alternatively make you a monster.
I have watched people buy courses that were written by someone who had the pattern recognition capacity open… But you can’t explain patterns… you need to see them, not understand them. So you can’t learn to do what the other person does, sorry to break it to you.
It may seem simple, it may seem easy, on the surface.
By the way, just like any other capacity. this, the pattern recognition capacity can be halfway open. What does that look like? You can see a pattern, and once someone explained it to you, you’ll recognize it.
- One of my teachers can recognize patterns in copywriting, but he mostly needs to learn it from someone else.
- A chess player will first learn hundreds of patterns from other people’s games, and then, when they have mastered the distinction ‘pattern’ they can see it everywhere.
Because I am learning disabled
Because I am learning disabled (I am dyslexic, for example) I have a hard time learning from someone… so I have developed, over decades, a methodology for looking for patterns and working on them… in books, in games, in language, in relationships… everywhere.
When I first heard Richard Feynman say: they don’t know Physics, the way I know Physics… They, his students, learned from others, while he needed to invent it for himself. I fully recognized myself.
I didn’t learn anything, I had to invent everything. Luckily I mostly like doing it… but if something can’t be invented, I can’t learn to do it.
This and similar conversations dominate my Sunday Rants
This and similar conversations dominate my Sunday Rants ‘podcast’. It is not free, because I ultimately give away my most secret thoughts, my strategies, and I don’t want anyone who wants it to have it.
So I only give access to a few people whom I trust.
If you want today’s call on this topic: IQ, the pattern recognition capacity, how my students struggle because the don’t have it, what are my choices in business, and how I am 50 years ahead of my time with my discoveries… No Nobel Prize is coming my way…
If you want this call, you can pay for it. If I want you to have it, I’ll add you to the mobile app where I have all my podcasts and 90% of my content.
If I don’t want to give it to you, I’ll refund your money.
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