Trust Your Own Intelligence

Steve Pavlina:

In the long run, it’s more important to learn to trust your own intelligence than it is to be right. At first your self-trust may be misplaced. You may very well find that you make a lot of dumb decisions by trusting yourself ahead of people who seem to know more. But through this process of failure, you’ll develop your intellectual capacity and expand your awareness, and soon your self-trust will be justified, and you’ll begin making some really empowering decisions that actually generate results.

The reason for self-trust becomes clear when you consider the alternative, which is never to fully trust yourself. You can’t really behave intelligently if you can’t trust your own decisions and act on them. Imagine what would happen if your computer was always doubtful about its computations, so it figured it was best not to share the results with you for fear of being wrong. It would be useless. And it’s fair to say that a human being who cannot trust him/herself is somewhat useless, in the sense that s/he is living far below his/her potential. But in that case, the most likely outcome is that this person will end up serving whatever goals social conditioning imparts. In the USA this means getting a job, going into debt, and gaining weight, among other things.

It’s fine to put more faith in your scuba instructor when you know nothing about scuba. That isn’t a self-trust issue. Self-trust comes into play when you make the big decisions of your life, such as those involving your career, your choice of mate, your spiritual beliefs, and how you will live. It isn’t intelligent to let your parents, your spouse, or your social conditioning make these decisions for you. I guarantee that if someone else makes these decisions on your behalf, your results in life will be nothing but a pale shadow of your true potential.

Trust your own intelligence, even when it doesn’t seem warranted to do so.

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