How To Become Street-Smart Even If You’re Not Book-Smart
Heighten your awareness of the eight primal flaws
Most of us like to think we’re street smart. We consider ourselves adept at sniffing out BS, skilled at clawing our way out of challenging problems, and savvy thanks to a fine-tuned intuition.
In my years as a salesperson and copywriter, I was fortunate enough to observe mentors schooled in the fineries of persuasion. Watching them work, it became clear. Most people aren’t street-smart, even the book-smart people who get straight A’s in school. They were easily fooled and blinded to obvious inconsistencies.
Street-smarts has nothing to do with your ability to score well on a test. It’s a different kind of intelligence, one that starts with awareness of what my mentor called primal flaws — irrational thinking and cognitive biases, vestiges from evolutionary development that no longer serve us in the modern world.
Because of these flaws, we interpret situations based on emotions and desires rather than objective deliberation, making us susceptible to manipulation, poor decisions, and faulty reasoning.
With awareness, you can learn to free yourself from these eight primal flaws and enhance your street-smarts.
