A couple of weeks ago, I was reading the book “The Age of Anxiety” during my lunch break. The author writes: “It’s true that most of us are more self-aware than we imagine. We think we’re only self-aware of the things we do, but we know more than that.
There’s no way of knowing what’s going on. We’re stuck with the same self-aware self-awareness that we’re stuck with the same “I don’t know what to do” self-awareness we’re stuck with thinking.
This is where education comes in. A lot of us, in fact most of us, have this self-awareness that we just know what to do. But we don’t actually know. We just know that we know what to do and what not to do. We know we should drink a little less. We know we shouldn’t eat too much. We know what to do, but we don’t. So our self-awareness isn’t really really self-awareness.
The problem is that when people get to a certain level of education, they still have this little self-awareness that they just know what to do. If you want to be successful in life, you need to become an expert in something. And that can be a lot of different things. Some people need to be able to cook. Some people need to be able to ride a bicycle. Some people need to be able to sew. Some people need to be able to write great poetry.
It’s not just the things we know that we need to be able to do that we need to know. It’s also the things we don’t know that we don’t need to know. I had a friend who went to a very elite school in New York. She was the first person in her family to graduate from college. She had that kind of self-awareness because she was so self-aware that she knew exactly what she needed to do to be successful.
We know that we need to learn to ride a bicycle, we know we need to learn to sew, and we know we need to learn to write great poetry. But what we dont know is that we don’t need to know these things. We dont need to know how to sew or write great poetry. We just need to learn how to ride a bicycle. That is the same thing as self-awareness.
Another question we don’t answer is this: Why do we want to learn to ride a bicycle? Well, we could just have a bunch of self-aware people go on a vacation to a place where they have to learn what they need to do to be successful. They could go to a school, and they could just get the answers to these questions just because they could. But its more likely that we are already self-aware.
What we can do is try and get more people to be self-aware. That will help us all realize that we are, in fact, self-aware.
This kind of self-awareness actually comes in the form of “learning how to be self-aware.” It’s an easy way to help people to get more self-awareness and thus to be more successful. This is actually the “real” part of Self-Awareness. You have to start by being aware that you are self-aware and then you have to be aware that you are successful.
The last part of Self-Awareness is to recognize that you are successful. The only way to become successful is to become aware of what you are doing right now. You don’t have to be aware of the past or the future, but you have to be aware of what you are doing right now.