On Intelligence

Sometimes, on the tennis court, I lose not to my opponent but to myself. The errors don’t come from technique — they come from my head: I start thinking too much, trying too hard, reaching for the “perfect shot,” as if a panel of judges were sitting around the court scoring not the points but the aesthetics of my game. And in that moment, self-reflection stops being a gift and becomes a noose.

The same thing happens in life. Intelligence helps when it works for us. But the moment we become its hostage — afraid of looking ridiculous or making a “stupid” mistake — it turns into shackles.

There are decisions that can’t be rushed: strategic ones, life-defining ones, the deep ones. But most of the opportunities that show up “here and now” are built like a blitz chess tournament: we have only a few minutes, and the winner isn’t the one who “sees twenty moves ahead” but the one who quickly plays moves that are a little above average and isn’t paralyzed by the fear of getting one wrong.

I once played in a tournament like that and, having no experience with it, lost almost every game. Not because my opponents checkmated me, but because I simply ran out of time. Instead of playing more-or-less decent moves on autopilot, I kept freezing, hunting for the perfect one.

Ever since, I’ve started noticing the same pattern everywhere in everyday life:

— someone doesn’t ask a clarifying question because they’re afraid of seeming dim, and ends up doing the work wrong;
— someone goes years without speaking a foreign language with other people because they’re embarrassed by their accent and their mistakes;
— some people skip an important meeting, filling in the other person’s thoughts in the darkest possible way instead of just showing up and talking;
— others put off launching a project because they need a watertight business plan, even though at the start it’s impossible to know how it all plays out;
— and some avoid anything new — the gym, a hobby, even a new haircut — purely out of fear of looking foolish.

If a decision is reversible — and most of them are — then it can be made with only fifty to seventy percent of the information. The rest reveals itself only in the doing. By trying to hedge and gather a full hundred percent, we postpone action… forever.

Acting on incomplete information, on the other hand, doesn’t just move us forward — it trains our intuition!

How do you test whether intelligence is getting in the way of your business opportunities? Walk into Pyaterochka, a Russian grocery chain, and ask out loud, in front of everyone, for a personal discount at the checkout. “That’s absurd! The whole point of having a brain is to not do things like that!” — and, technically, we’d be right. Will we feel a wave of resistance, of shame, of the sheer absurdity of it? Probably. The request most likely won’t work (though who knows?), but that’s not the point. The point is how many opportunities we lose in other contexts, where it just might have worked — and we’ll never find out until we try.

I’ve made decisions thousands of times where I probably looked like a complete idiot. But now I’ve got two bonuses out of it:
a) experience,
b) immunity to other people’s reactions.

Here’s to being the master of your own intelligence — and deciding for yourself when to let it stay awake and when to let it step aside so we can act, even if those actions cost us a little blush in the cheeks! 😎