Know yourself, what you know and especially what you don’t know

Do you dare to take a close look to yourself?

People have their own experiences, knowledge and skills. Are you willing to take an honest look to yourself and see what you are capable of and what you are not?

Finding the courage to take a look at yourself is difficult but so important. It’s great to look at yourself to know what you are capable of but knowing what remains a challenge to you is crucial. If you know what is new to you what you haven’t understood yet you are able to work on that field in your life. If you instead ignore what you don’t know you will have something that you struggle with for the rest of your life. Be honest with yourself to learn what you can still improve on. The benefit you get for knowing yourself is that when someone asks you to do something you instantly know if you will be able to succeed at it. Compared to if you don’t know you would either have to say you can try or say you’ll do it but you are unsure if you can succeed.

Know thyself – Socrates

You can only build sufficient experience and knowledge into something if you know who you are and what you can do. In our everyday life it happens more and more that we look on social media and compare ourselves to other people their situation. This harms us more than it can help us. If you stop comparing yourself you can take more time to look inwards and focus on what is important for you. The more time you are spending with yourself the quicker you will know what you are capable of doing right now and which of the things you will have to wait a bit longer for before you can succeed at it.

The only way to really start learning is if you know what you have already learned and where you can still improve on. Often times there is something that we excel at and some other subjects that we are less experienced in. For example you could be very good in any mathematics but lack some gut feeling when you want to learn a new language. When you know what your strength and weaknesses are you can improve your weaknesses. Instead of focussing so much on what you like doing and what you can understand easily you can put some extra time in what challenges you. After which you can still spend time on what you love and what you understand quicker.