How Intelligent Are You Really?

I was listening to the Modern Wisdom podcast with Chris Williamson and Naval and Naval said something that really stuck with me “There is only one true test of intelligence, getting what you want out of life.”

In today’s world, most people continue to be unfulfilled, unsatisfied, anxious & depressed because they are playing someone else’s game.

They are playing the game that either their parents, friends or society is expecting of them.

They are playing the game of: 1.) Go to University 2.) Get a Job 3.) Get a Wife 4.) Have Kids 5.) Work For 45 years until you retire

If this is what you want to be doing and what you want out of your life, no problem, enjoy, however I would be willing to bet their is something on that list you are doing because you feel like you “have” to and not because you “want to”

You Do Not Have To Do Anything

I would also be willing to bet, that the reason you are living the life that others expect of you is because you are afraid of being judged, ridiculed or rejected from your family, friends, or society.

But what is actually worse?

Living your one life inauthentically, dragged around and making choices that you don’t want for decades or having the “hard conversation” to let those closest to you know about what you really want in life and then going to pursue that?

”Everything you want in life is on the other side of a hard conversation.”

The hard conversation may sting for weeks, months or maybe some years, however if you don’t have that conversation, you will be living with regret for the rest of your life, what could possibly be worse than that?

Society likes to reward those who make money, have the looks, success, cars and the beautiful women around your arm.

Again, nothing wrong with any of those things, however, if what you want out of life was happiness for example and you had all of those things but not happiness, than how intelligent were you really?

You got all of the things that society said you should have yet you never accomplished your goal(s) and what you wanted in life, so how intelligent are you really?

If you have the wife, the kids, the family and the house with the white picket fence in the suburbs but all you wanted to really do was be a surf instructor in Thailand who rode his motorcycle around and lived below his means, than did you really win?

Were you really that intelligent in the end? I would say no.

So what are the steps, whats the action plan that we can take to make sure we get what we want out of this life and end up intelligent enough to win the game?

Here is the breakdown:

1.) Decide what you want in this life
2.) Create a plan to make it happen
3.) Have the “hard conversations” with those who will try to stop you, or just do what you want and ignore them
4.)Execute consistently
5.) Learn from failures and iterate along the way
6.) Keep going until you have achieved what you want
7.) Start again with something else

I would say that the most underrated aspect of this breakdown is the learn from the failures and iterate along the way.

I used to think and believe that getting what I wanted was all about the repiticions, whether it was the number of spanish classes that I took or the amount of bachata classes that I took.

My motto used to be “reps, reps, reps, reps”

And while the reps are important, if you are not learning from the reps and iterating along the way to improve than you are just going to be hammering home some bad habits which will be difficult to break later down the road.

There is a an idea that it takes 10,000 hours to gain mastery in something, I would argue that its not the amount of hours that is as important as the number of iterations we make along the way.

So if your goal in life is to be happy, find peace, travel the world, have the family or be the next grandmaster chess player, figure out what it is that you want and get to work to achieve it.

That is how you will be able to tell how intelligent you are during your life and at the end of it.

You figured out what you wanted and you got it.

You didn’t get distracted along the way and follow someone elses plan for you.

You stayed true to yourself and lived life unapologetically on your own terms.

That is an intelligent person.

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Here is the podcast episode of Chris Williamson and Naval, I can’t recommend it enough: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549?i=1000701535098