People with a good head on their shoulders tend to have fewer enemies: they realize not everything is a competition

by Shirley Marie Bradby

January 07, 2019

People with a good head on their shoulders tend to have fewer enemies: they realize not everything is a competition
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What is ignorance? It is a lack of knowledge or experience. In reality, we are all ignorant, only that we are not all ignorant of the same things and we are not even able to recognize our own ignorance in the same way.

And it is this lack of knowledge or experience that makes an ignorant person our enemy if we have different experiences or knowledge with respect to him or her. 

Wise people, on the other hand, know that a good part of their virtue lies in knowing that they do not know, as Socrates claimed.

This awareness of our ignorance is what reveals our imperfection when dealing with perfection. In any case, wise people keep away from rivalry, so they rarely have enemies.

via Psychology Today

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People who ignore their limits are canceled out by their own point of view, given the impossibility of establishing any type of assertive communication with them. Anything that does not fit into their mindset will be a source of conflict. 

The wise man, however, is always looking for wisdom, the fool believes he has already found it.

This is called the Dunning-Kruger effect; when ignorance is so shameless that it tries to pass itself off as true knowledge. We are talking about those people who believe they know everything. In psychology, it refers to a cognitive distortion for which inexperienced people tend to overestimate themselves in terms of the real knowledge they possess.

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People with a good head on their shoulders tend to have fewer enemies: they realize not everything is a competition - 2

This false self-perception was discovered in 1999 by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, professors at Cornell University. The two researchers analyzed different situations in which ignorance seemed to offer more security than knowledge.

Ignorance that is ignored or not acknowledged is the cause of many disagreements. On the contrary, the awareness of one's own ignorance stimulates curiosity and improvement.

In fact, knowing also means being aware of what we do not know yet and opening the door to motivated learning. In this sense, humility is the ideal travel companion for wisdom. Recognizing ignorance allows us to understand that human beings are a work in progress.

Therefore, when someone labels us as ignorant, then, do not be offended, but thank them for the reminder and invite him or her to teach us new things or discover them together.

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