Cognitive Reprogramming

Self-belief must be balanced with self-awareness. I used to hate criticism of any sort and actively avoided it. Now I try to always listen to it with the assumption that it’s true, and then decide if I want to act on it or not. Truth-seeking is hard and often painful, but it is what separates self-belief from self-delusion.

The physicist and science writer Leonard Mlodinow puts the point more broadly. “While IQ scores may correlate to cognitive ability,” he writes in Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking, “control over and knowledge of one’s emotional state is what is most important for professional and personal success.”