Nice to meet you . My name is Fred. I had the idea for this blog two days ago, and I find myself writing the first article.
This is the perfect time to explain what I have in mind when embarking on this project.
For starters, here is a personal story. A fairly banal personal story, which I unfortunately have in common with many people: Covid, then the after-effects of Covid, memory loss, mental fog, job loss, forgetting my appointments, not remembering what I did the day before, not understanding what is happening to me, then realizing, after many months, the simple reality: I am no longer the same.
They call it “long Covid”. I call it becoming someone else. It took me more than two years to accept it: I will not become the same again.
Before all this, I had a good memory. I remembered people and their names without even trying, just because I did . I didn’t need to write down my appointments because I remembered them. I remembered what I had to do, I had my calendar in my head. I remembered conversations. I didn’t need to take notes or record them.
All this seemed natural to me.
It was when I lost these facullties that I realized that how lucky I had been. And especially when talking to my friends, and hearing many of them tell me that they never remembered people’s first names, that they have always been obliged to write down their appointments. And yet they are very intelligent, efficient. They just got used to take notes. I’ll have to learn that now…
Conclusion : I was totally wrong when I had the impression of losing my intelligence, I only lost one or two faculties that I was used to using. The ones with which I had built my personality with. And my vision of how things work.
In short: I’m probably as smart as before (or as dumb. I’ll never know). As smart, but different. Because I don’t have the same tools and faculties anymore. So I have to find new tools, new approaches. Not to become smart again, (because, as I said, I’m probably as smart as before), but to become efficient again, avoid trouble, regain the ability to move forward in the world without failing. In short, things will have to change.
And it’s a bit urgent. Because, well, after a while, all these human and professional failures make you lose confidence. It ends up ruining the mood.
That’s where this blog comes in: finding other ways to be efficient means looking for tools that can allow me to use my intelligence in a smarter, more efficient way. But what are these tools? It’s to answer this question that I started to move forward, and to think.
Before Covid, I may have had a good memory that served me well, but I wasn’t totally happy with myself or my life either. I began to review my friendships, my love life, my family life, my relationships, my professional choices – in short, all the things that weren’t necessarily going so well.
I remembered my failures and started to think about them and find similarities with this “Covid fog” issue.
I realized that in reality, there was a lot of work…
And I told myself that if I could start looking for ideas to find my professional qualities, I could also start looking for ideas to improve the areas of my life that were not as brilliant.
Because intelligence is not just being got at school, remembering things and understanding concepts. It’s many other things. And the goal is to enjoy life, not to write another dissertation.
So. I’ve read a few books. I liked the topic, and now I’m creating this blog in order to share my progress, write, and learn more.
Starting tomorrow. And since I’m still a beginner in discovering what intelligence is, I’ll start with an essay around the opposite topic : what intelligence is not…
