One of the many common Curses of Smart is being hypercompetent at a couple of tricks that you’ve adopted to be passably effective at life while being incredibly blind to your own limitations and bad habits.
Just want to drop a note here that this curse (a) got me through years of major depression, making me, I guess, “high-functioning”, and (b) caused the worst interpersonal crisis I’ve had-or-expect-to-have in my life.
For me it wasn’t really a trick, per se. Just, more like… being smart enough allows you to simply brute force a bunch of areas without ever being good at them, and it feels like good enough because “passable effective at almost anything while concentrating” is legit better than median. The main failure mode when phrased like this, though, should be quite obvious—you can only concentrate on so much. The secondary failure mode is that even when concentrating, if you don’t have good heuristics born of experience actually getting good at a thing, your passable effectiveness is brittle even when you think you are concentrating, because it has bad default behaviors in the gaps of things you don’t know should be part of your concentration.
(I am not affiliated with any of these orgs. I did attend a pre-CFAR proto workshop thingy.)
This sort of thing is so common that I would go so far as to say is the norm, rather than the exception. Our proposed antidote to this class of problem is to attend the monthly Level Up Sessions, and simply making a habit of regularly taking inventory of the bugs (problems and inefficiencies) in your day-to-day life and selectively solving the most crucial ones. This approach starts from the mundane and eventually builds up your environment and habits, until eventually you’re no longer relying entirely on your “tricks.”
Just want to drop a note here that this curse (a) got me through years of major depression, making me, I guess, “high-functioning”, and (b) caused the worst interpersonal crisis I’ve had-or-expect-to-have in my life.
For me it wasn’t really a trick, per se. Just, more like… being smart enough allows you to simply brute force a bunch of areas without ever being good at them, and it feels like good enough because “passable effective at almost anything while concentrating” is legit better than median. The main failure mode when phrased like this, though, should be quite obvious—you can only concentrate on so much. The secondary failure mode is that even when concentrating, if you don’t have good heuristics born of experience actually getting good at a thing, your passable effectiveness is brittle even when you think you are concentrating, because it has bad default behaviors in the gaps of things you don’t know should be part of your concentration.
(I am not affiliated with any of these orgs. I did attend a pre-CFAR proto workshop thingy.)
This sort of thing is so common that I would go so far as to say is the norm, rather than the exception. Our proposed antidote to this class of problem is to attend the monthly Level Up Sessions, and simply making a habit of regularly taking inventory of the bugs (problems and inefficiencies) in your day-to-day life and selectively solving the most crucial ones. This approach starts from the mundane and eventually builds up your environment and habits, until eventually you’re no longer relying entirely on your “tricks.”