Your self awareness sucks

Ramblings on knowing yourself, understanding others and what really matters

Long time no rant, y’all. Appreciate your patience.

I’ve been offline for a while working on rebranding my startup - what was once TPS Engage is now called Blindspot. Here’s our new website as well. And here’s why we decided to call it that.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into it with today’s thought exercise.

The captain of a Japanese ship places his wedding ring in his cabin. When he goes back, he realizes it’s missing. He calls 5 of the crew members that he suspects might have stolen it and asks them what they were doing:

The cook stated that he was in the freezer looking for something to cook.

The engineer stated that he had been working on the engine for the generator.

A seaman stated that they were on the mast fixing the flag that was upside down.

The radio officer stated that they had been messaging the company about their arrival.

The navigations officer stated that they had been sleeping in their cabin. The Captain immediately knew who the thief was. How did he know?

An answer, as usual, at the end of this newsletter.

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Self awareness won’t take you far

I’ve been thinking a lot about how proud I used to be about the fact that I would spend a lot of time in introspective thought.

Almost every action I’d do, I’d have a reasoning for it - be it emotional or rational.

I extended this habit to empathy as well and always tried to understand the reasoning behind someone’s actions.

It served me well for a long time and helped me get ahead of things often.

The problem, however, is that self awareness is just the first step of a complicated journey. Took me a while to figure that one out.

Just like there’s a huge difference between knowledge and wisdom, there’s an almost endless chasm between awareness and acceptance.

Knowing why you did or thought something won’t help you in the long run unless you can accept those reasons.

I feel self awareness takes a lot of the spotlight on the public agenda (and especially on social media), but it’s never presented in its true form. People talk about understanding your inner thoughts and feelings, but they rarely talk about accepting them.

Instead, they talk about self improvement. They talk about always being better, being greater, being a superior version of yourself.

Which is valuable as long as you do it in a way that doesn’t harm yourself. All the hustle and Vaynerchuck-isms in the world won’t save you from yourself if you never think you’re enough.

Being content doesn’t mean conceited. It means knowing where you are, being at peace with that and only then deciding if you want to move in another direction or not.

Even if hating yourself in order to improve would work, it’ll just lead you to a new (and maybe improved) place where you’ll hate yourself just as much.

This is why self awareness can never work without self acceptance.

Here’s a great short video on this topic.

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Answer: The seaman stole the ring. The Japanese flag can’t be upside down, it’s a red circle on a white background and looks the same way even if inverted.