Stop me if this is familiar.
You’re smarter than the average person – maybe even much smarter. When you were younger, study came easy to you and you were often the smartest person in the room.
There’s no denying it. You’re clever, maybe even a genius. You see things that others don’t – you always have.
But:
- Your achievements don’t match your intellect,
- Other people confuse you,
- You’d surely succeed if just someone gave you a chance,
- You spend a lot of time arguing with or complaining about idiots,
- Your life is boring or unfulfilling,
- Dumber folks than you consistently get what you want – like a relationship, business or dream job,
- You’re smart but unhappy,
- Other folks bore you,
- You’re lonely,
- There’s so much potential inside of you, so close you can almost taste it,
- You expected to be further along in your life by now,
- You’re a disappointment to yourself sometimes… but at least you’re not like the typical person,
- You have big dreams, even a sense of destiny about your life. Sometimes you even make progress towards it,
- You’re better than average at every mental trait,
- The inner world inside your mind is so much richer than your appearance suggests.
In short…
Your mind is brilliant and your intellect is stellar.
But it sure is hard to prove it.
Congratulations, you’re a midwit – smart, opinionated and useless.
Prediction:
You were smart at school. Maybe it took a lot of work, maybe it came easily for you.
But then the real world hit you.
Suddenly, you weren’t so smart anymore. You might have found yourself surrounded by plenty of folks with lots of raw intelligence, diminishing your own light with theirs. It could be that you tried to apply your gifts – to a business, maybe – only to find it takes more than brainpower to succeed.
And now you’re disillusioned. The world made an implicit promise t you – that you were smarter and maybe even special. Now, you cling to every shred of proof that you can find that you are, in fact, intelligent. You revel when folks disagree with you, so you can “destroy” their arguments with your “brilliance”. Never mind that you’ve never converted anyone to your way of thinking – at best, you just laugh with those who agree with you and yell at those who don’t.
If reading this makes you angry, good. That’s proof that I’m talking about you.
Which means you genuinely can become smarter.
That’s the tragic irony of being a midwit – by pretending you’re already incredibly smart, you stop thinking. Someone who thinks they’re already strong won’t lift weights. Someone who thinks they’re already fast won’t train for hours a day.
If you’re a typical midwit, then you don’t use your brain properly. Being wrong offends your ego, so you shelter behind dubious reasoning and ideological bubbles.
Like a sports car with a jammed gearstick, you have the potential to be impressive. But only when you make some changes.
If you take a supercomputer and get it to run SimCity 2000, the results won’t be impressive. Likewise, using your brain to think subpar thoughts doesn’t make you intelligent. No matter how mighty your mind is, thinking like a stupid person makes you stupid.
Here’s how to rise above all that.
Here’s how to stop being a midwit, stop being an intellectual coward and finally start thinking with clarity.
This will take practice. So practice. You have years of habits to break – but, when you do, you’ll be amazed at how much clearer you think.