I actually consider myself a quite unintelligent person. Straight up. In terms of knowledge in my brain, I've gotta be in one of the lowest percentiles. And I love it (or at least I tell myself that to try and justify it/make myself feel better).
I love it because once I realized I'm not very smart, it made me so curious. I will pick someone's brain about whatever he or she is interested in for hours. I tend to get sleepy if I ever try to read a textbook or try to learn something from reading, so if I'm with someone who knows a ton about fitness/lifting (for example), why would I not be genuinely curious in talking to them. How To Win Friends and Influence People is by far my favorite book, and I have implemented its concepts into my everyday
life. In it, Dale Carnegie elaborates on the idea that everyone's favorite thing to talk about is themselves. And it's a fact. Give someone a genuine sense of interest (key word: genuine), and they will talk your ear off for hours. I've learned that this skill can be especially beneficial now that I'm trying to figure out what I want to do post-college. I'll get lunch with someone who's in real estate and flood them with questions about who they are, what they do, what they enjoy/hate about what they do, the industry in general, and the list goes on. I leave that conversation feeling great because I just learned more in a 30-minute chat than I ever would've through any other medium. Oh yeah, not to mention I now have someone in my network that I can go to in the future. Networking was a paradigm shift for me; I always thought it was sleezy and something that would be awkward and I'd be bad at it, but once I realized it literally is as simple as being genuinely interested in what the other person is doing, it got a lot more fun.
My intelligencer (or lack thereof) has pretty much always been my biggest insecurity. People I meet think I'm smart and most of my friends would think I'm an idiot for saying I'm not a smart person, but it's true. I'm good with people and bad with knowledge so I play to my strengths. Not only does curiosity play into learning more, though. Being curious has also helped me develop close relationships. If one of my best friends is having a rough day, I'm so curious how they're doing, eager to listen. Why wouldn't everyone? Isn't that like the whole point of human connection? Isn't that why we're here? It dumbfounds me how few people talk about their emotions, inner thoughts, and real wishes out of life. At least from my experience, there are a ton of guys at UD that don't talk to their closest friends about real stuff. And they crave it so badly. Sure, talking about stuff that you really deep down want to talk about (and asking others as well) may make some people think you're "weird" (when in reality, those people probably have deep-rooted insecurities so they do that to hide from themselves), but that's a big part in how I've found the friends I have. It's how I've weeded out which guys in Dallas I want to hang out with and which I don't. Same goes for high school and college. If I don't mesh with someone because we have different values, I'm good. I could care less what other people think about them. If I don't like their intentions or things they talk about, count me out.
I feel like I keep just going in different directions with these blog posts, but I think it's because I've just been typing quickly and blogging as if it's my journal, which I guess was the whole point of starting this blog in the first place. So I think I'm happy with that.
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