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Psychologist Adam Grant’s 10 Percent Principle Will Make You Instantly Smarter
It’s true that IQ is a relatively fixed trait, which means our intellectual horsepower doesn’t change much over our lifespans. A Fiat cannot magically turn into a Ferrari. But how you maintain and operate the incredible machine that is your brain makes a tremendous difference in how far and fast it can take you.
Which is why I’ve always kept an eye out for advice from neuroscientists, writers, and coaches on how to make the most of your brain. There are lots of good tips on how to be smarter out there. But a recent LinkedIn post by star psychologist and best-selling author Adam Grant boiled down much of this wisdom into just a few actionable words.
You can think of Grant’s actionable idea as the 10 percent principle.
How to be smarter: Be less dumb
If you want to figure out how to be smarter, it can help to start by turning the question on its head. Instead ask, what makes people dumb? When we make short-sighted decisions, fail to consider crucial information, or blindly repeat mistakes of the past, what drives us to this kind of stupidity?
There is no shortage of answers to these questions, of course. Sometimes it’s one of the human brain’s many well-documented biases making fools of us. Emotions can overpower good sense. A stressful environment basically deducts points off your IQ.
Even more often, the root of the problem is arrogance. We think we know the right answer already, so we don’t investigate enough to know what we don’t know. Dumbness ensues.
As psychologist David Dunning, who is famous for studying stupidity, once put it, “Not knowing the scope of your own ignorance is part of the human condition.”
As Grant himself pointed out at a recent conference, being intellectually gifted doesn’t protect you from arrogance. Ironically, it tends to make you more vulnerable to it. “The more brilliant you are, the worse you are at recognizing your own limitations,” Grant said.
In short, what frequently makes us dumber than we have to be is thinking that we’re smarter than we really are.
