The 3 Levels of Self-Awareness by Mark Manson. Plato said that all evil is rooted in ignorance. If you think of the evilest, shittiest people imaginable, they are shitty not because they have flaws — but because they refuse to admit that they have flaws. Below are three levels of self-awareness:
- What the Hell Are You Doing? You need to have a simple understanding of where your mind goes and when. You must be aware of the paths your mind likes to take before you can begin to question why it takes those paths and whether those paths are helping or hurting you.
- What the Hell Are You Feeling? This second level of self-awareness is where you really start finding out “who you are.” I hate using that phrase because it doesn’t really mean anything, but this is the level that people talk about when they say they are “finding themselves”—they are discovering how they actually feel about the shit going on in their life, and often they have been hiding these feelings from themselves for years.
- What the Hell Are Your Blind Spots? If we know our weaknesses then they stop being weaknesses. Otherwise, we become enslaved to our mind’s faulty mechanisms.
Know Yourself (theschooloflife.com). In Ancient Greece, the philosopher Socrates famously declared that the unexamined life was not worth living. Asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied: ‘Know yourself.’ Knowing yourself has extraordinary prestige in our culture. It has been framed as quite literally the meaning of life.
Why Self-Analysis Works (theschooloflife.com). The more we think, the more our fears, resentments and hopes become easier to name. We become less scared of the contents of our minds. We grow calmer, less resentful and clearer about our direction.
10 Things You Don’t Know about Yourself (scientificamerican.com). You probably do not understand yourself as well as you think you do
What’s behind the confidence of the incompetent? This suddenly popular psychological phenomenon. (Washington Post). In their 1999 paper, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, David Dunning and Justin Kruger put data to what has been known by philosophers since Socrates, who supposedly said something along the lines of “the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.” Charles Darwin followed that up in 1871 with “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Put simply, incompetent people think they know more than they really do, and they tend to be more boastful about it.
How We Judge Others is How We Judge Ourselves by Mark Manson. If you measure your life by how much you’ve traveled and experienced, then you will measure other people by the same standard – how worldly they’ve become. If they prefer to stay home and enjoy the comforts of routine, then you will judge them as incurious, ignorant, unambitious, regardless of what their aspirations really are. The yardstick we use for ourselves is the yardstick we use for the world.
How To Predict Your Future by Darius Foroux. Well, you might not be a fortune teller. But I have an exercise for you that predicts your future accurately. It’s straightforward: Look at your actions.
These 20 Questions Will Improve Your Self-Awareness by Darius Foroux. Benjamin Franklin put it best: “There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.” Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a universal answer to self-awareness. Everybody is different, and the only person that can teach you self-awareness is you.