Most winners in life master one thing in particular: they are astute. Astute: having or showing an ability to accurately assess situations or people.
Accurately assess… as opposed to have an opinion, have a good feel, or guess…
Is that a skill, a capacity, a virtue? What is it and how do you get it?
A have a new “most visited” post, the 31 quotes that give you chills… Why? Because it promises an experience… an experience you crave in the consistently dull and painful life you have.
Wanting to get chills without any other benefits says a lot about you and your life. What does it say? For one: you are a mystery to yourself…
I have said it before… humanity bars its way to evolution by throwing big words around.
What do I mean?
One of the ways you keep yourself from personally evolving is
- by not differentiating cause and effect,
- by component and the whole…
- and never learning how.
If you thought that the car is bad because it has a flat tire, you would buy a new car every time you get a flat… or need an oil change… or maybe every time when you need to refuel.
Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?
But in areas of skills and knowledge and decision making: this is exactly how you see the world.
Every time you say you’ll become confident… you’ll try to do that.
Every time you say: I will become less judgmental. At least you try not saying your judgment.
How are these the same as looking at the car as a one piece no components “monolithic” thing?
Easy. There is no such a “thing” as confident. Confident is not even a skill… even every skill is made up of a few or many capacities.
Capacities are the individual components, skills are a group of them, and abilities are the whole machine… The screws, the transmission… and the car.
So when you say: “I am not confident,” or “I want to be confident” you don’t know that confidence can only be attained by practicing and attaining the individual skills and capacities. All of them.
In our quest to earn the good life… by becoming worth a damn, we need to master a lot of skills by activating a bunch of capacities… so the “car” can get off the road… to take us to the good life.
It is not what self-help writers, psychologists, or other “buy this wonderful car” writers and teachers teach.
In self-improvement, self-development, just as in the car industry, there are the workers, the mechanics, the manager, the designers, and the salesmen and the repairmen.
They all relate to their process as the only way to look at a car, its manufacture, etc.
Self-help writers are the car salesmen… have no clue how a car is built… they just want you to buy them. They have no clue how to correct something when it’s not working… it is not their problem.
And just like in car-buying, you are more interested in the color of the car, than what you should know about the inside of the car, the capacities of the car, the build of the car..
You watch youtube videos, you buy energy healing, energy teaching courses, seminars, books, etc… and you notice, that despite your puffed up sense of self, nothing changes. You do nothing better, you choose as poorly as before, you don’t do things well… you are not smarter…
You are, if that is possible, even dumber than you were before.
How come?
You are trying to do things without having tools that fit the task.
- If you look, for example, at Warren Buffet, he is masterful at picking assets to buy to make money for his clients…
- He has 30 capacities that are behind and underneath the approximately 10 skills it takes to do that job well.
It took him 50 plus years to get from dumb awkward kid to astute investor.
Why? Because you can’t develop skills on non-existing capacities.
A capacity is the smallest unit of which skills are built of. 1
Of course no one is even looking there.
Humanity, as a whole, is quite dumb… when it comes to living. They are good at mechanics… but not at living. Not at themselves.
As it is said somewhere: there are three mysteries
- air to a bird,
- water to a fish,
- mankind to himself 2
In spite of the millions who experiment with meditation and other experiences, experiences will not take you to knowledge… because you are still seeing your experiences with the fixed mindset of the “it’s a car…” it’s confidence… that is given by the vocabulary.
When your vocabulary is at 300 (the normal for humanity at this point) then your ability to see details, see things for what they are accurately is between zero and none.This is why it took Warren Buffet 50 years! His accurate vocabulary, by now, is 3000.
That seems to be the ceiling for a normal human, a billionaire. But the “mystery”, the invisible, the inside, is not visible with the accurate vocabulary of 3000 words…. if you listen to their advice, in a book, on videos, in articles, they don’t speak about capacities… they don’t know about them.
So if they don’t, and they are billionaires, why should you?
Simple. If you have the right guidance focusing on capacities, you can grow a lot faster, or for most of you: you can grow at all.
The current teaching modalities do not allow you to grow.
There are notable exceptions: for example the Idohosa aka mimic method is going at the capacity… hearing and mimicking sounds, so you can learn languages faster.
But I haven’t seen any training program that trains a non-physical capacity, a non-physical skill to go that detailed.
So people and courses produce, at best 1-2% results, while students pay full price.
All because they, the teachers, haven’t penetrated the mystery, the parts the whole is composed of.
I myself am only waking up to this now. I myself haven’t taught this way. I saw what I saw, but didn’t think of breaking things up to components…
But it is better late than never… I am doing it that way now.
I myself am noticing stuff, as a result, that I would not have noticed before.
Here is a trivial sounding discovery… but just ask someone with acid reflux, if acid reflux is trivial… lol… not funny.
I have been having acid reflux. Last night I asked a question that I had never would have asked previously: is it possible that acid reflux only needs the taste of the offending substance to flare up?
In the case of people with damaged esophagus who have fructose sensitivity or fructose intolerance, this taste is anything sweet. Including sweeteners. Including sweet vegetables. Or sweet flesh of animals. Or butter…
Some errors or good ideas in processing food result in the food getting sweeter.
If you add a little water to your hemp… when you don’t have patience to make hemp butter… you get sweet hemp… and you’ll get a heartburn if you are sensitive to sweet.
Or if you don’t completely burn off the protein parts in butter when you make ghee… same thing.
You think your shortcuts are a sign of how clever you are… and your shortcuts are killing you.
Because you don’t see beyond the surface…
And you probably do this everywhere… because how you do anything is how you do everything.
- Interestingly, as you work on a skill, the needed capacities are stimulated, poked at, and occasionally they spring to life, self-activate. This is important knowledge, because EVERY achiever did it this way.
- Aletheia Moments:
The word Aletheia is a Greek word and means “the state of not being hidden; the state of being evident”. It is used to represent a disclosure or truth, that something in the background is brought into awareness.
We are incredibly complex creatures, so complex that there are many things about ourselves that we do not know or see. One of the purposes of life, for those of us with a spiritual disposition, is to discover who and what we truly are.
This process seems to be facilitated by consistent work to reveal more of ourselves, to become more conscious of our inner workings and to see our own inner self as well as the reality we inhabit.
An ancient Hindu proverb states that the three greatest mysteries are “a fish unto water, a bird unto the air and a man unto himself”. This proverb states that as humans, our own selves are a mystery to us, that in fact the way we are is so unconscious to ourselves that it is much like water is to a fish. We are in it all the time yet never really see it for what it is.
Through many great and ancient traditions we have been handed down a variety of tools for this personal unveiling. Practices like meditation, yoga and chi kung have become widespread and accessible to all as a way of working with the personal, subjective experience. Through these practices we are presented with the opportunity for seeing more of ourselves from the inside and some form or another is highly recommended for anyone seeking to become an increasingly ‘better’ and conscious version of themselves in this life.
Yes. it does look effortless. And how many times have you heard: if he can do it, then I can do it too. Or Tai saying: he is not that much smarter… OK, maybe double smart… so I’ll make only five million… lol.
This is really the biggest problem with humanity: that the invisible becomes bigger through seeing too many people do things effortlessly. And it is utterly invisible how much work it takes to develop the capacities, to develop the skill.
There is a good sentence in Tai’s 67 steps: he quotes his mother (supposedly) saying: you can do anything, but not at the same time.
And, did you notice, no one wants to choose? And the ones that have (my accountant clients!) they hate it.
If and when you can start seeing the capacities or the beginnings of a capacity, or a partially open capacity, you can build on it. But the blind hate prevents you from it.
Hi Sophie,
You wrote: A capacity is the smallest unit of which skills are built of.
And them being invisible. No wonder learning anything or making any real change stick is so difficult. We dont even know we dont know. Funny, when you watch somebody who is so good at what they do they make it look effortless, easy. Like that balletdancer or pianist or a painting.