Ha! We should form a club.<p>&gt; Seems to me like, this type of behavior stems from the childhood (up until college) where being a relatively smart person allows one to keep afloat (and even shine sometimes) without spending much effort.<p>&gt; Put simply, you are now doing 5&#x2F;10 effort for 8&#x2F;10 results while it used to be 1-2&#x2F;10 effort for the same result.<p>Oof, yeah. It wasn&#x27;t until years later that I realized my primary and secondary school experiences had led me to categorize <i>having to study to understand something</i> both as a kind of failure and as something akin to <i>cheating</i>, of all things. It&#x27;s not a way of thinking I&#x27;d settled on consciously and not something I&#x27;d have framed in those terms until I spent some time reflecting on my thoughts, but sure enough, that was what my stupid, stupid mind had been doing. Totally bizarre.<p>&gt; This, combined with the fact that your pride now firmly lies in your level of intelligence, makes self-improvement really hard. How? First, you don&#x27;t wanna do the easy stuff, because, well it&#x27;s not worth your intelligence; so you dream of doing the hard stuff. Reading complicated books, learning a new language what have you. Then, you start unconsciously delaying doing&#x2F;learning the hard stuff. You only do those if it&#x27;s part of your job so you have to. You delay it, I think, because the fact that you may not accomplish those deeds in the short amount of time you think you should, proving yourself that you&#x27;re not as smart as you think you are. That, is like the ghost at the end of the dark hallway. You don&#x27;t even wanna risk getting into that state of mind.<p>I get that. I also have to watch myself very carefully or I&#x27;ll end up making lists and ranking things and researching and never actually <i>do</i> the activity those actions are supposed in service of.<p>&gt; &quot;I just don&#x27;t have the time&quot; or &quot;I really haven&#x27;t spent much effort on this&quot; is a much better excuse for you than &quot;I&#x27;m just not smart enough. Need to work harder&#x2F;longer on this&quot;.<p>Bingo.<p>&gt; Don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s the case for you, but it feels like it is for me. I&#x27;m trying to let myself go to fix this basically. It&#x27;s okay to not be brilliant. It&#x27;s okay to fail, make mistakes, suck at certain things while being just okay at other things. There is no implicit need to be excellent at everything you do. More importantly, &quot;too proud to be dumb&quot; is a bad mindset to be in. Even if you are as smart as you think you are, you are not fully utilizing your capacity by restricting yourself due to a fear of slightest failure&#x2F;mistake.<p>My approach to fighting this lately has been to deliberately seek things I <i>know</i> I&#x27;m awful at and work on them at least until I see improvement. Pick up a new instrument, write a program unlike anything I&#x27;m familiar with, take dancing lessons (coming up this Summer!). Eventual mastery isn&#x27;t the point—just improvement. I know you&#x27;re supposed to specialize in this modern economy of ours and just keep improving skills you&#x27;re already good at, but I <i>need</i> this kind of thing, I think. It&#x27;s like <i>failure therapy</i>.