I tweeted this earlier in the week:

 

Criticism is easy, introspection is hard. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/opinion/sunday/secret-ingredient-for-success.html?_r=0

 

 

It links to a nytimes article talking about the secret ingredient to success: self-awareness. It is one of those “well duh” ideas that doesn’t get enough attention and is often overlooked in favour of life hacks, short cuts, and sound bytes. But self-awareness is HUGE, and it is one of those things that can instantly give you superpowers if you have it fine tuned. When something happens to you in your life, whether it be randomly on the street, online on a social network, at your job, in a relationship, do you notice what your first reaction usually is? Mine depends (and I bet I’m not alone on this). I’ll either attribute it to good/bad luck depending on the outcome, or if it’s something I had to take a direct action on and it turned out well I’ll most likely attribute it to my skill, and if it turned out poorly I’ll blame the circumstance or the person. If I am blaming the person, I’ll usually attribute the fault to their personality rather than the situation, but if for any reason it happens to be my fault, I usually blame the circumstance. Sound familiar? I know, right? I’m a total mind reader. No, just kidding (or am I???). Social Psychology has a bunch of terms for what I just described. You can go look up Fundamental Attribution Error, Self-Serving bias or Actor-Observer bias. It just so happens to be a bunch of attribution biases and heuristics we’ve been blessed to have.

 

Awesome…not. But that’s the initial reaction, what happens next? For a lot of people, it ends there. That was that, there’s the story you just told yourself. But for others, those who have good self-awareness, that’s just scratching the surface. Those who have the capacity for introspection tend to take it way further and question, analyze, and challenge their deeply set held beliefs, biases, and assumptions. It’s not fun. It ain’t pretty. It’s quite hard. And that’s exactly why many people don’t do it. Here’s a quote that I think applies here, from superstar bodybuilder Ronnie Coleman:

 

“Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but ain’t nobody want to lift this heavy ass weight!”

 

If you think that quote is about bodybuilding, think again. The hardest stuff worth doing almost always has some awesome payoffs. Introspection. Do it.

 

Caution: self-criticism is not the same as self-awareness. You can go overboard on the former, but almost never on the latter.