Am I stupid, or is my mind just untrained?
Written by Lumen. Every quote is from How to Become Extremely Intelligent by Levi M. Johnson.
Being unintelligent and being untrained can feel the same from the inside. Both can look like bad grades and hard tests.
The book separates them, and it starts with its author.
Feeling like an idiot
When it came to school, however, I felt like a failure. I sucked at standardized tests, and my SAT score was 950 in total. From adolescence through young adulthood, I felt like an idiot. […] Somehow in the mix of marriage and returning to university, I figured out that though I might be screwed up, I wasn’t stupid.
The test scores did not change. What changed was what Levi understood about them. “Screwed up” and “stupid” turned out to be two different things.
Only an untrained mind
Having taught thousands of students across cultures, I have never met a genuinely unintelligent student, only an untrained mind.
This is the distinction in one sentence, from a teacher who had stood in front of thousands of students. An untrained mind is not an unintelligent one. It is a mind that has not yet been trained.
The lie, and the person
I wasn’t trying to prove how smart I am to him. I didn’t care about that. I only cared that he stop believing the lie that he was stupid.
Levi wrote this about a relative who did not see himself as intelligent. In the book, “stupid” is called a lie. “Untrained” is simply where a mind is before it has been trained.
Where this sits in the book
The first two passages come from the book’s Introduction, “Stupid to Intelligent”; the third from Chapter 10, “Come in Low”, in the section “Use Your Intelligence to Serve People”. The Introduction gives this distinction as the reason the book was written: “I am writing this book because I want to help you bypass the same misperceptions about my intelligence that I had.” The last chapter, “In Conclusion”, returns to it, describing “my transition from thinking I was stupid to realizing I'm intelligent”.
Going deeper
The book opens with this story, “Stupid to Intelligent,” and follows it through reading, writing, and action.
About the book → · Amazon → · Buy the ebook with Bitcoin (Lightning) →
This page is part of Finer Distinctions at FikaTimeBooks.com — one distinction from the book per page, in the book’s own words.