The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. — Naval Ravikant
There is a science to intelligence.
But most people get it wrong. They think intelligence is about book smarts and cognitive tasks. Those play a role in your success, of course, but there is much more to the story.
People who score well on IQ tests usually land in the “conventional” stages of psychological development. Little do they realize (because lower stages can’t understand higher stages) that they are still in the bottom 60% of true intelligence, not book smarts.
Even more, many “smart” people are lonely, broke, unhealthy, and angry at the world. They can think through complex problems but they can’t solve the bigger, more holistic problem of living a rich life.
Chris Langan, the man with the highest IQ, says, “Most high-IQ people have the magnification, but not the aperture.” In other words, and as we will learn, IQ is not the be-all and end-all of intelligence. If your mind is a camera, there’s more than just the ability to zoom in.
Now, if you want to have Jordan Peterson’s articulation or Alan Watts’s thinking, give yourself one year of practice.
1 year.
1 hour a day of study based on what you will learn in this letter.
That isn’t much to ask to develop the one trait that determines nearly all of the success in your life.
The ability to navigate your mental health.
The ability to make as much money as you want.
The ability to understand reality and get what you want out of it.
That’s what we’re going to learn.
Where do we start?
Cybernetics — The Art Of Getting What You Want
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result — Einstein
Cybernetics comes from the greek word kybernetikos which means “to steer” or “good at steering.”
It’s also known as “the art of getting what you want.”
So, if Naval’s definition of intelligence is getting what you want out of life, understanding cybernetics helps you do that much, much faster.
Cybernetics illustrates the properties of intelligent systems (hint: your mind is a system, a meta-system).
To have a goal.
Act toward that goal.
Sense where you are.
Compare it to the goal.
And act again based on that feedback.
You can judge intelligence based on the system’s ability to iterate and persist with trial and error.
A ship blown off course that corrects toward its destination. A thermostat sensing a change in heat and turning on. The pancreas excreting insulin after blood glucose spikes.
What does this have to do with getting what you want out of life?
Everything.
Acting, sensing, comparing, and understanding the system from a meta-perspective is fundamental to high intelligence.
High intelligence is the ability to iterate, persist, and understand the big picture. The mark of low intelligence is the inability to learn from your mistakes.
Low-intelligence people get stuck on problems rather than solving them. They hit a roadblock and quit. Like a writer who fails to build a readership and quits because they lack the ability to try new things, experiment, and figure out a process that works for them (to think that there isn’t an effective process you can create is verifiably false, no matter your limiting beliefs, hence being low intelligence.)
High intelligence is realizing any problem can be solved on a large enough timescale. The reality is that you can achieve any goal you set your mind to. This isn’t something that can be disproven within reason.
Intelligence is realizing that there is a series of choices you can make which lead to achieving the goal you want. You understand that ideas are hierarchical and that you can’t go from papyrus to Google docs in one fell swoop. Even if that goal is impossible right now, you simply don’t have the resources — which may be invented over the next few years — to achieve that thing.
If you want to become more intelligent, start with the goal you are pursuing.
Goals are what determine the system.
The destination is what determines the journey.
The goal and destination are vastly more important than the system or journey, because they create it.
Sure, you can argue that “the end of a melody isn’t its goal,” as Nietzsche would say, but the goal of the artist was to create the melody. Anything you do, from reading this letter to moving your eye a fraction of a centimeter to taking one step forward to scratching your nose to building a billion-dollar business, is the act of pursuing a goal, creating the melody in its path.
The destination is a point of view that allows you to appreciate the journey.
Why do people always say, “It’s all about the process” while celebrating that they reached the goal?
Because you rarely enjoy the process, and that’s okay. Your not supposed to enjoy everything. You need a bit of suffering to appreciate the periods of peace. If you were “happy” all the time, it would become normal to you. Happiness would stop making sense. All true happiness stem from a perspective of previous sadness.
In other words, the journey and the destination are inseparable.
When I talk about “goals,” I am not speaking from the typical lens of self-help, although that’s a helpful lens to adopt at times.
I am speaking from the lens of teleology or the Greek kosmos — that everything serves a purpose. That everything is a part of a greater whole. Goals, in this sense, aren’t anti-spirituality, they are spirituality. Finite games vs the infinite game that houses finite games.
The telic properties of reality that can be found when you play a semantic game and broaden the definitions of things like energy and money. Not goals for the sake of status, but meaning that can be observed all around you.
Man is by nature a goal-striving being. And because man is “built that way,” he is not happy unless he is functioning as he was made to function — as a goal striver. Thus true success and true happiness not only go together but each enhances the other. — Maxwell Maltz
Goals are so much more important than we think in a world where people can’t stop regurgitating programming from their new school, “systems over goals!”
Goals determine how you see the world.
Goals determine what you consider “success” or “failure.”
You can try to “enjoy the journey,” but if you pursue the wrong goal, you are making it 100x more difficult to enjoy it.
Your mind is the operating system for reality.
That system is composed of goals.
For most people, those goals are assigned to them. Programmed like lines of code in your psyche.
Go to school. Get the job. Get offended. Play victim. Retire at 65.
A known path that doesn’t work.
To become more intelligent, you must:
- Reject the known path
- Dive into the unknown
- Set new, higher goals to expand your mind
- Embrace the chaos and allow for growth
- Study the generalized principles of nature
- Become a deep generalist
Hyperspecialization keeps you subservient to the dominant paradigm.
The difference between humans and robots (especially AI), is that humans create the paradigm. They tell the story. They frame the project. Robots can only function toward the goal or story assigned to it.
How Your Mind Interprets Reality
The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy — or attention — is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The mind has two key purposes for survival:
- Achieving known goals
- Discovering unknown goals
The mind is an information processing and pattern recognition machine that we have a certain amount of control over based on our level of development.
The mind is a system — containing a complex set of systems — that accepts, rejects, and uses information to aid in the goals you feed it.
If you’re always focused on negative outcomes, they will become reality, and you’ll blame everyone but yourself for the misfortune in your life.
The man who conceives himself to be a “failure-type person” will find some way to fail, in spite of all his good intentions, even if opportunity is dumped in his lap. The person who conceives himself to be a victim of injustice, one who “was meant to suffer,” will invariably find circumstances to verify his opinions. — Maxwell Waltz
In other words, if you think you can, you can, and if you think you can’t, you can’t.
At the root of your mind, like a puppet master, is your identity or ego.
Your ego is a system of ideas, beliefs, values, and standards that shape your perspective. Contrary to popular belief, the ego is not the enemy. It’s the storyteller. The interpreter. Your job isn’t to get rid of it, your job is to develop it. To expand it. To remove the conditioned limits keeping you in a narrow-minded perspective that makes life reactive and negative.
Your perspective is like the lens of a camera.
You can zoom in and out.
You can focus on one part of the scene — while the background is blurred — or focus on the detail of the entirety of the scene.
Your perspective influences your perception of situations.
Meaning, your identity will limit the information it can perceive, and if it receives information that does not match its beliefs, values, or standards it will reject it.
Your mind automatically accepts and rejects information that aids in the achievement of the goals that are programmed into your head.
If you want to get a job, dopamine will signal the importance of information and opportunities that help you get that job.
Your book highlights will reflect that goal. How you approach conversations (with anyone) will reflect that goal. What you engage with on social media will reflect that goal (and the algorithm will help deepen the roots of that identity by showing you more of that information, for better or worse).
If you want to quit your job, dopamine will do the same thing. Like hunters that notice new berries on a bush, dopamine signals information that is important for the survival of your top-of-mind goal, so you are more likely to remember and utilize that information.
Your Google searches will change from “best careers to go into in 2024” to “best businesses to start in 2024.”
Or, you’ll be more compelled to check out Digital Economics where I help you deconstruct your identity and turn it into a profitable one-person business.
Your book’s highlights, even in something like a novel, will be vastly different from those of someone else with a different goal.
With or without knowing it, we are all reinforcing our potentially mediocre identity that determines the outcome of our lives. For most people, this will be negative.
Your Mind Is A Cybernetic System
Society is a behavior system.
And there are 3 big goals that they injected into your mind right when you learned to comprehend the language you speak.
1) School
2) Job
3) Retire
99% of people are only interpreting everyday situations in a way that leads to those goals. They study what they’re told to study for the sake of status and survival, thus closing their mind off to things that really matter in life. They become a specialist slave who is dependent on those who need that specific knowledge. They don’t have the deep and generalized skill set that allows them to pursue their own path. A writer who only learns writing doesn’t have a chance at making an independent income.
99% of people are practicing the skills, focusing their attention, and programming their minds to live a mediocre life without even knowing it because they failed to question and revolt.
A realization people often make too late:
Success is not planned, it is automatic.
Successful people — whether they were conscious of it or not — had a mind that was programmed to achieve the goals that led to their success. They saw life through the perspective of their goals, and that allowed them to store the right information in their subconscious, influencing their choices that compound into achieving that goal.
Your identity, perspective, and perception of situations are all systems that feed into and reinforce each other in that order.
80% of living the life you want boils down to creating your own goals while most people are mindless slaves to society’s goals.
Goals change how you interpret situations, which influences your actions, which programs your identity, which compounds over the years into a rich life.
You can’t become aware of a problem unless it impacts a goal.
You can’t solve a problem unless you’re aware of it.
Most people don’t have goals. Most people are afraid to make mistakes. Most people don’t give themselves a chance to improve any aspect of their life.
If you don’t invest energy into a goal, you won’t feel the pain of not reaching that goal.
Occasional, non-alcoholic-level drinking wasn’t a problem until it took away from achieving my goal of cutting weight for the summer and writing my book.
I never saw it as a problem until I had those goals. My morning runs suffered after a night of even moderate drinking. I was dehydrated and lacked motivation. My writing suffered with brain fog. Every day of not making progress toward my goal became more and more painful until I finally made the choice to stop that “bad” habit. And at that point, quitting that habit was frictionless.
The point is that problems aren’t problems unless you have a corresponding goal. If you don’t have any worthwhile goal, you aren’t able to see the plethora of problems that, once solved, lead to a better life.
Most don’t have a clear vision of what they want from that goal, so the negative impact of their actions goes unnoticed.
Your bad habits don’t seem worth quitting because you don’t have responsibilities (or prioritize those responsibilities) that deserve you at 100% capacity.
If the importance of those responsibilities outweighed the pleasure of your bad habits, you’d stop without question.
Goals are intertwined with identity.
Humans survive on the conceptual level.
We feel threatened when that which makes us, us is threatened.
A bodybuilder will feel stress and pain when they are in an environment that provides less control over their training and diet.
A routine is a set of practical goals that order the mind. A writer who moves to a new location or travels for an extended period of time will have a stressful acclimation period until their mind runs on new systems. If they can’t write well in their normal routine, they feel threatened, because “who they are” may die.
If you were to condition yourself with new stimuli (constant self-education) to the point of having an identity that couldn’t “survive” without achieving new goals — you would inevitably achieve whatever they are with ease. If you want a successful business, relationship, or anything that is out of the norm, you must fundamentally change the goals your mind operates on by changing who you are.
To change who you are you must educate, practice, and experience new information to reprogram your mind’s faulty wiring that was installed by society.
The Stages Of Psychological Development — Reaching The 1%
As Albert Einstein supposedly said but didn’t:
You can’t solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it.
If you want to become more intelligent, you need to expand your mind to see the bigger picture. To tell a more holistic story. To view situations from all perspectives. To not decapitate your thinking by conforming to one perspective that is verifiably false because of its one-dimensionality.
When you have a higher goal, you can think more intelligently toward that goal.
But you can’t expand to a higher level of mind in an instant.
In fact, it takes an entire lifetime to reach the highest stages (who knows how much further human development will go when technology allows us to live until we’re 500. Don’t die.)
We are going to dissect Ego Development theory in relation to our definition of intelligence. For the sake of this letter, higher stages are synonymous with higher intelligence.
There is much more nuance to this theory. I would encourage you to read the full research paper by Susanne Cook-Greuter here. I would also encourage further exploration of concepts like Spiral Dynamics and Ken Wilber’s AQAL Model to round out your understanding of this all.
We will be pulling relevant information for our use cases in this letter.
In EDT, there are 3 directions of movement:
- Horizontal — Lateral expansion at the same stage. Developing new skills and adding information and knowledge.
- Vertical Up — Transformation. Growth to a new stage and perspective.
- Vertical Down — Temporary or permanent regression due to life circumstances, environment, stress, and disease.
Horizontal development is filling one’s cup.
Vertical development is expanding the size of the cup.
Fun fact: stress alone can cause you to regress into a lower stage of development. This is often why we are more narrow-minded and reactive when stressed, but if you reach higher baseline stages of development, stress doesn’t bring you down as far. Lower lows.
The graphic above from Sloww is showing the Spiral Dynamics stage colors (another model for human development). It’s worth noting that development happens in a spiral shape. You often find yourself feeling like you are looping back around to a similar phase of life, but with a new perspective. It also represents the cycle of individuation and integration.
Our goal is to reach new stages of vertical development and not get trapped in the horizontal development rat race.
It’s great to develop new skills and acquire new knowledge. Those are necessary for growth in many regards, but they aren’t what allow for growth to a new level of mind and thus, intelligence and getting what you want.
Reaching new stages of development requires an evolution of your perspective. You need:
- Time, understanding, and horizontal development in that stage. New skills, challenges, and goals.
- Awareness of and open-mindedness to explore a perspective different from your own.
- A fundamental change in who you are through education and conscious conditioning, a commitment to deeper understanding and seeking truth.
- Cybernetic trial and error. To have a goal that resides in a new stage of development, solve problems in the way of that goal, and self-correct when you realize you didn’t solve the right problem.
Pain is sometimes a necessary catalyst for reaching a new perspective. It’s like when you get so disgusted with where you are that you finally break through to a new level. A new perspective emerges, and you evolve.
Understanding the stages below can drastically change the direction of your life.
Once you are aware of them, you can work to advance through them.
Pre-Conventional Stages — 5% Of Population
Most of you aren’t in these stages, so we will keep it brief.
The pre-conventional stages — symbiotic, impulsive, and opportunist — are characterized by ego-centrism.
Most of the population develops through these stages from the time they are born to around the age of 10 years old.
There is a lack of distinction between self and other. Needs are focused on survival, personal desires, and immediate gratification. And toward the tail end of these stages we begin to understand that there are social rules we need to adopt and follow.
Conventional Stages — 75–80% Of Population
We can think of the conventional stages as monkeys copying other monkeys in the attempt for status and becoming the top of the food chain.
This is where most high-IQ people land.
Note that none of these stages are “worse” than another. They are simply “lower.” Everyone has to go through every stage. The problem is getting trapped in any given one, which is very easy to do and easy to notice in society.
When you talk to someone in a conventional stage, you are often talking to a TV or YouTube channel, not a unique individual. This is rather prevalent in the political scene right now.
Stage 3) Conformist
Their identity is defined by their relationship to a group.
High school students focused on popularity. Corporate employees that stick to the rules, like attending all mandatory meetings. Military or religious adherence.
In other words, conformists obey the authority and conform to the group. This can be most observed in “bible thumpers,” people who never question the religious ideology they were raised in. (Remember: you wouldn’t be a Christian, Catholic, Muslim, etc if you were born on the other side of the world. This is indisputable.)
Stage 3/4) Expert
The expert stage is characterized by self-authorship (personal growth), tackling complex problems, self-reflection, and complex problem-solving.
Professionals live in this stage. Engineering types. Skill-centric. Scientific materialists who think everything can be explained through modern science.
They are good at doing tasks but bad at knowing if they are doing the right task. They can’t see if what they’re doing is important for mankind.
They are the “know it alls.” They know everything and think everything should be done their way.
Stage 4) Achiever
Most of western education and schooling are geared toward creating achievers.
This is the pinnacle stage of where a person can end up in their mind. It is the definition of Western success.
There is a shift from employee mindset to entrepreneurial mindset. A shift from individual skill to how that skill can be utilized in society.
In our space, this is the dominant characteristic of most people on social media. The self-help and business stage. Hamza, Hormozi, and other self-improvement, business, or masculinity creators are examples of achievers who occasionally glimpse into post-conventional stages. Like when they read The Way Of The Superior Man, but interpret it through the lens of an achiever.
This is why I often use YouTube titles that attract those in the achiever stage. Like when talking about how to make a lot of money. They are my target audience. I want to introduce them to the next stages of development and ease them into spirituality and other deeper topics. And, it helps that there are quite a few of them online.
Post-Conventional Stages — 15–20% Of Population
Each stage has different goals and worldviews.
Meaning, their idea of success evolves, so the system their mind runs on evolves with it. If we would consider an efficient system to be “ordered,” we can understand why chaos, discomfort, and pain are a part of development.
As mentioned, the conventional stages are like monkeys copying other monkeys (but a bit more developed, of course). But that’s not intelligence.
Intelligence is your ability to solve problems because you can’t solve a problem from the same mind that created it. You must expand. So, if you get stuck in a job or something else you hate, and don’t solve the problem by expanding your perspective, you are not intelligent.
Intelligence is questioning your beliefs, realizing deep generalized patterns, and understanding the contradiction of truth — that the only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth.
The post-conventional stages are where we start to encounter systems thinking. That wholes are greater than the sum of their parts. That reality is more like an organism than a machine that can be dissected and studied.
The big step between tier 1 (conventional) and tier 2 (post-conventional) thinking is just that. It’s multi-perspectival. It’s not just about your business model, self-help ideology, or religion. You begin to notice the properties that compose them all. Like how Christianity and Buddhism point to the same identity of reality (God) even though they would disagree on that, because lower stages don’t understand higher stages, but higher stages understand lower.
In these stages, you begin to collect more perspectives. The higher you are on the mountain, the more you can see the multiple paths to get to where you are. The more you desire to help people take a better path.
Stage 4/5) Pluralist
A 4th person perspective is discovered.
Pluralists begin to step outside of the system they grew up — the status quo — and question their beliefs and values.
The most prevalent example would be a hippy who has a vision of everyone becoming a hippy. But they can’t yet see the development others have gone through, so that vision falls flat.
Think of this as the evolution from bible thumper to atheist to a hippy who first discovers spirituality, but they still haven’t looped back or integrated the truths from the bible thumper.
Now, imagine this across multiple domains, like in work, where people go from corporate drone to entrepreneur to starving artist, but haven’t realized that they can do what they love and make a decent living out of it while contributing to humanity — this is what I attempt to teach by bridging the conventional and post-conventional in Digital Economics.
(These aren’t entirely accurate, but work well as examples.)
Stage 5) Strategist
I resonate a lot with the strategist stage.
It occupied a large portion of the past few years of my life (from what I can tell, I may be delusional and underdeveloped. I’m open to that).
Strategists realize that intuition is more powerful than logic and rationality (found in conventional stages). To think that something has been formally proven is silly and close to impossible.
Exploration and discovery start to become more important than achieving a goal or making a lot of money — which can often lead to achieving more goals and making more money.
The strategist has a vision of what the world needs to move forward in the evolutionary process and understands the generalized principles of reality.
The Strategist is a value creator. Their main concern is self-development, other-development, self-actualization, integration, and owning their shadow. Truth can be approximated but higher is better (higher perspective).
Stage 5/6) Construct-aware
In my eyes, Jordan Peterson falls mostly between the construct aware and strategist stage. In terms of religion and his doubling down on Christianity, he still has a conventional shadow, unless he is using that as an act to help more people develop from those stages, which could very well be true.
If the mind were a computer, construct-aware people would understand that:
- Conventional stages play one app or video game on that computer. Their on one site or browser.
- Post-conventional stages can start to navigate the full desktop. They can play the most meaningful games and even create their own.
The construct aware tap into a 5th dimension of thinking, the cognitive dimension. They can see how the mind constructs reality and meaning. They can see that most people find solace in a perspective, but they can’t zoom out beyond those perspectives themselves to a now larger whole.
This is where the generalized principles of reality really start to click and connect. Unity and division, creation and destruction, entropy and wealth. They begin to think about the world from a new, abstract layer that can bring them pain as they are constantly battling with the question of, “So what? What does this supposed mental masturbation do to help me?”
The answer is more holistic decision-making.
The Top 1% Of Intelligence — The Transcendent Stages
Finally, the top 1% of intelligence.
The Unitive stage.
Where mystics start to sound more delusional than they do insightful.
And the insightful ones, like Alan Watts and Terrence McKenna, have a way of easing your worries with simple and profound sentences describing reality.
They tap into source. Infinite intelligence.
Reality is now regularly experienced as the undifferentiated phenomenological continuum or the creative ground of unified consciousness. Every object, word, thought, feeling and sensation, every theory is understood as a human construct: separating out, creating boundaries where there are none. The quest for meaning and connection is an essential aspect of the human condition. Giving names to experience and making distinctions is necessary for human growth, study, interaction and communication, but at the source there is nothing to distinguish. — Susanne Cook-Greuter
To reach this stage of development, you can’t force it. You have to go through all other stages and that may take a decade or three from when you start your journey out of conformist thinking.
Rebelling against the beliefs you were raised to see as absolute truth is the day you are born.
But, it does help to understand the main characteristics of this stage so you can notice them and aim for them. With that awareness, you can identify mistakes in your decision making and work to correct them.
Traits of the Unitive stage:
- The Truth is imminent in the universe but can’t be grasped by logic or rationality.
- They adopt a universal or cosmic perspective as the organizing principle and a steady place from which to derive meaning.
- Most definitions of enlightenment are achieved. They metabolize experience in a completely new, radically open way.
- They understand the need for a personal ego to survive while also recognizing the illusion of the desire for permanence. The ego is useful as a perspective or lens when needed.
- Dualities and conflict are witnessed without tension or the desire to change them.
- They live in a creative ground and lean into an ongoing humanity, fulfilling their destiny of evolution.
- Life is seen as a form of temporary and sometimes voluntary separation (Bodhisattva) from the “creative ground” they are grounded in.
- They aren’t passive like conventional hippies assume. Instead, the non-personal stance allows for more conscious, powerful, and direct action when it is needed.
In other words, there is a stark difference between the hippies and the unitive.
Hippies attempt to separate from the world and deny the ego.
Unitives reside mostly in a separate state, but understand that entering the relative world is necessary for most work, social interaction, and evolution.
To recap, intelligence isn’t about book smarts or magnification.
It’s about holistic pattern recognition and aperture. Your ability to zoom out so far that all boundaries and limits are dissolved.
Through conscious development and having the awareness of when you are closing yourself off to growth and getting trapped in any stage, you can reach the unitive stage.
In fact, my book, The Art Of Focus, attempts to cover much of the path to reaching these higher stages of development. Or at least that was my attempt.
Thank you for reading.
I hope this topic is as profound and transformative as I have found it.
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