Thanks for sharing that article Steven Baxter. I wasn’t aware of his on stance on his old theory.
That being said, it’s not so much the specific categories or the naming that matters but the fact that various skills do use different parts of your brain. So even if the 9 intelligence turn out to be wrong, I still stand by the concepts of acceptance and adaptability.
If I’ve focused all my learning on logical skills, it’s normal that I’ll learn other logical skills faster. As such, I should accept that learning to draw for example, a mostly creative skill, should take me more time to learn. If I accept that, then I don’t give up too early and persevere.
I personally don’t like categorization of people into buckets. I find it limiting, and especially for people who believe 100% in it. I used to dismiss them entirely in fact, until I recently decided to use it as a reference for me to figure out what should I concentrate my self-improvement on.
However, I still don’t take them seriously because they are subjective at best. I think it’s a sane approach to not put all your faith in them.
As for not being able to do what I did, it may be so but not for the reasons most people would think. I want to re-iterate that I’m nothing special. I was far from being a “learning machine” growing up. The three things I can think of right now that made it possible for me are these things:
- Creating productive habits;
- Shattering my limiting beliefs; and
- Persisting in the face of adversity.
Before October 2017, I had none of these things going for me. I was productive when developing software, but that was it. I didn’t have great habits. I used to think that there were “simple” things I couldn’t do. Now I focus on how I can do them. And more importantly, I would always give up at the first sign of failure.
Somehow, in a pretty accidental way, I started building strong habits, shattered most of my limiting beliefs, and started to persist when things didn’t go right. These are all things anyone can do.
I hope this clarifies things a bit. Thanks for sharing the article again!
