Most authors, most gurus, most spiritual/money/prosperity/marketing teachers each contributed one distinction to me… if any.
Actually, most didn’t… Famous ones, successful ones, amazing ones… nothing. I was left with nothing.
One of these distinctions, by Robert Scheinfeld, is considering that all you see when you look is through the limited perspective of the human mind. The 1%.
But seeing things the only way we can is not the problem. You see what you see.
Here is a coaching email I sent to one of my students:
But unless you have the humility to say: I see this from the limited perspective of the human mind… you are arrogant.
You need the get the difference between an insight, or an answer, and THE answer.
This is what humility is about. Allowing the world to be bigger than your limited perspective decided it is.
Whether you are a student or you are a guru.
A whopping 35 people bought my Muscletesting course.
Muscletesting is not easy. Why? You guessed: because all your questions come from the limited perspective of the human mind.
But if you know that, you suddenly have access to different questions.
Millions of people claim they can do muscletesting. And the mechanics: certainly. Getting at least 80% accurate answers: not even any… outside of the method I teach.
Of course, inside the limited perspective there are still a ton of perspectives, depending on height, depending on width, depending of ability to discern.
Astute is the word for someone who can combine all three perspectives to a clarity and accuracy level only few can go, and are at the root of lasting riches of the billionaires.
Billionaires, as Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger say, they became billionaires by making less mistakes… a lot less mistakes.
And what is at the root of all mistakes? All the stuff that makes one NOT astute. Assumption. Arrogance. Jumping the gun. Not being able to tell one thing from the other… or, in my student’s case, thinking you got THE answer.
Commitment and consistency, a cognitive bias, in fact all cognitive biases, are the enemy of good decisions, and cause most of the mistakes humans make.
It’s not an accident that Charlie Munger has spent his time to collect fifty-something cognitive biases and logical fallacies.
What is a cognitive bias? It is a shortcut. It is a knee jerk reaction. It is the arrogance of humans that prevent them from saying: this is how it looks from the limited perspective of the human mind. MY human mind.
Mistakes are unavoidable, of course, but can be limited by adopting this saying as your mantra.
If you are interested in living a life worth living, being healthy, wealthy, have love and fulfillment in your life, your goal should be to increase your astuteness.
One way is to learn a lot of new things… another is to unlearn a lot of new things.
Unlearning is the most expeditious.
If you know math, basic math, elementary school math, you know that reducing the overall increases the percentage of the accurate, even if quantitatively in didn’t change.
Let’s say you fancy yourself knowing 100 things. Your astuteness is 25%. 75% of what you know is inaccurate. If you get rid of just 25 inaccurate things, you are left with 75 things total, but the accurate knowledge size did not change, it is still 25 things.
But your accuracy level is now 33%.
- Warren Buffet’s accuracy level is 40%… one would think, from his results, that it is near 100%. But not so.
- Charlie Munger’s accuracy level is 50%.
- Bill Gates’ accuracy level is also 50%.
Whatever it is, before you try to learn new things, you need to purge the inaccurate, useless, meme-like rules and knowledge.
You don’t like that you have inaccurate knowledge? No one forced you to be here. No one forces you to have a great life… go and tell everyone all the inaccurate knowledge… Other people do the same. With PhD and MD after their names.
But life is unforgiving. It’s easier to see it in business…
