Being humble in what one considers to know.
Recognizing that no matter how much one learns or studies about a subject, all the knowledge is being interpreted through one’s own ways of looking and conditioning. Plus models are a simplification of reality and rely on core assumptions (what is the model ignoring)
Acknowledging the Complexity of the world, accepting the unknown and embracing uncertainty
Being open to being wrong: changing your mind is one of the best ways of finding out whether or not you still have one
Always obsess about there being big holes in your map that you just can’t see, because you’re being blind to some perspective that other people, even in your direct vicinity, may understand but you simply don’t. Remember that these holes are what can turn your life inside out and trick you, so that you wake up one day as the bad guy and the deluded one. Happens to the best of us.
clarity is a red flag for delusion
A total sense of clarity is not a sign of actually reaching the answers. It’s just a red flag that you’re becoming deluded or your mind being short-circuited. Rather, expanding your world map always entails an opening into a renewed sense of mystery. It can make you more sure about certain things in the world (Einstein predicting the observation of gravitational waves and so forth), but it leads you to wondering more and more. ==A better world map is one that increases your capacity to wonder.== And to live with a sense of bewondered awe is not so bad.
If anything, the insight that we all have world maps and that these are by definition incomplete, and that the maps can red pill one another, inoculates us against the tendency of becoming “true believers”. Yeah, sure, you may have had a stroke of insight that felt cosmic, that shattered the earth and sky, that gave Mother Gaia herself an orgasm, that lit up the worst terrors of the universe with a burning light of love, and all that jazz. But what do you think the others were doing meanwhile—just sitting there and being boring? Are you so sure they don’t understand something equally or even more radically transformative that you don’t? Maybe you’re far above a person, but that person is simultaneously far above you in a manner you cannot imagine? Maybe they’re just playing with you, watching you in see-through, from above? Maybe you’re a child to them, just as they seem a child to you, only in ways you cannot understand. Maybe what you’re telling them is awfully predictable. You have this experience with other people, don’t you? Don’t you think others have it with you? The world doesn’t need preachers and proselytes—it needs ironic prophets, the believers who don’t quite believe themselves, because they trust in a reality bigger than themselves. The earth will be inherited, then, not by the meek, but by the sublimely mediocre.
Book - 12 Commandments For Extraordinary People To Master Ordinary Life by Hanzi Freinacht
Related: epistemology Inspired by: Daniel Schmachtenberger | sense-making