I started this article with nothing and everything in my mind really, so everything I have written is spontaneous (Head-to-paper). I asked a friend beside me to be my muse, and tell me something I could write about, and she said ‘SELF CONFIDENCE’.
I responded that self confidence is often mistaken for pride. And it struck me about how the line between self confidence and pride can be easily crossed.
Often, self confidence can be intimidating and easily mistaken for pride. For example, when I talk about factoids or topics I am very familiar with, I tend to speak loudly and boldly, which is unusual because I am a slow and lazy talker and as such, the mannerism and confidence with which I talk about topics I am well grounded in is usually misunderstood as pride.
The Perspective
The other day I was walking home with a friend, he stared at a light bulb and said to me:
"Gift, you know, the average Homo sapiens is not very smart. It is the intellectual minority who are doing the extraordinary things and advancing the human race with new inventions in science and technology, and they are incorporating it into the society in a pseudo manner, so there is no revolution by the majority, because they will feel like the minority is forcing their ideas on them.”
I thought about this for a long a while because I felt there was something to learn from it and apply to my life. Then something happened in school with my classmates as they had accused my friends and I of being THE CABAL making decisions for the entire class, and that whatever decision that is made without our approval didn’t stand.
It was funny to hear a fellow classmate say that when all we do is just air our views on certain matters and not actually making any decision per se. That was a classic scenario where ignorance isn’t bliss, as she knows nothing about kind of conversations my friends and I have. So, I remembered what my friend had told me about majority and minority of humans.
What I took from what he said is that: ‘when people feel like their input to the society is not as valuable as someone else’s, they will feel threatened, and the basic human instinct will set in afterwards; most often aggression’
Conclusion
I believe intelligence has no limit, and there is always going to be those who are smarter than you, well informed than you in certain areas. And that’s perfectly okay. You should not feel threatened by other people’s intelligence and find a way to discredit them by tagging them proud.
Instead, appreciate them and accept that there is no limit to knowledge and people will know things you don’t know, and also say those things confidently. Irrespective of the manner with which it was said, filter what you can from it and consume; like the blue whale which is the biggest animal on the planet, but still feed on tiny krills.
Information is to humans what krill is to the blue whale. Get the information you need and make good use of it however you see fit. As it is the information age we are in right now.
Thank you for reading and God bless you.
Intelligence has no limit but at the same time we should always try to be the smartest person in the room 😁