Intelligence and Limiting Beliefs
In one of the newsletters I’m subscribed to, the author commented on how he had taken advantage of a COVID quarantine period to learn how to solve the rubik’s cube. I had tried several times to put it together and had never managed to complete more than 2 faces. It frustrated me not being able to solve it, but I thought it was about some skill or intelligence that I didn’t have, so I stopped trying. Hearing someone state categorically that everyone could solve the cube sparked my curiosity, and after following the links and a few days of practice, I managed to solve it too.
This gave me a disappointment, a lesson and a metaphor.
The disappointment came from something I considered difficult and a sign of intelligence, which ended up being more of a mechanical skill.
The lesson comes from the fact that thinking the Rubik’s cube was difficult was a “limiting belief”. Since I thought it was harder than what I could deliver, I didn’t even bother to look for information on how to solve it. And when someone showed me that it was easy, the “limiting belief” disappeared and in a few days I was able to learn it.
The metaphor is perfect. We will never learn what we consider to be harder than what we can learn. A self-fulfilling prophecy. And the worst part is that we know there’s nothing that is impossible to learn. Everything is within our reach, especially nowadays, with all the information available on the internet. There are only 2 issues: (1) believing that we can learn it and (2) motivating ourselves continuously until we learn it.
Moral: Be careful about putting an “intelligence” on a pedestal, because most of the time it’s a skill that can be learned!