We are in an information era where we don’t complain that much about the overload of information, but rather lament the lack of opportunities to grow our Intelligence and develop our talents. Very often, we are not aware of the options that are available to us. However, I would say that our outer world is a reflection of our inner world. When we have the real and full picture of who we are and of our potential, we can become aware of a broader spectrum of alternatives.
Photo by Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash
By raising our awareness about our potential, opportunities to express it are not going to pop up from anywhere as if by magic. Those opportunities have always been there but now, we can recognise them more easily because they have appeared in our inner radar. And they may include areas that we would have never thought about if we didn’t do that prior work on ourselves, on connecting with the collective intelligence and in clearing the negativity around us. All our opportunities to grow our Intelligence are not given to us, they start from ourselves. We can’t wait for opportunities but we rather need to create them. And the fact is, they are actually part of a pleasant journey: they are the possibilities to grow our multiple talents, to build our own curriculum and to find our own purpose. And here again, the Augmented Intelligence can help us.
Taking ownership to grow our multiple inborn talents
The first action to realise our potential is to take ownership of the development of our potential. As mentioned in another blog, our Intelligence is made of different types of inborn talents or intelligences, and we can identify more than 15 other intelligences in addition to the cognitive intelligence. If traditionally our cognitive skills have been developed by Academic and training institutions, they fall short of training us for the others.
In theory, growing our inborn talents should not be a problem in our information era. However, there are several factors preventing people to develop them. First, they may not be aware that their specific talent is a proper intelligence that can be developed with the right training. And there is also the case of people who don’t know how to improve their talents and so rely on others, sometimes maybe not the most appropriate ones, to tell them what to do.
But the fact is that people do know. We unconsciously know. We know what we are good at and what is definitely not for us. We know what uplifts us and gives us a motivation to try again and again to become an expert, and what just drain our energy out and that we would happily give up without looking back. So the technological challenge from a personal development perspective is not how to tell people exactly what to do and how to do it. The technological challenge is to trigger that unconscious knowledge and build our confidence to use it.
People need the support of the Collective Intelligence for each one of their type of intelligence for guidance and to be on the right track. And that can be done by Technology and processes with continuous human input to update and refine the algorithms. But we also need space to find our own Truth, follow our intuition, create our own goals and pathway, and expand toward new opportunities. To also contribute and give back to the Collective Intelligence.
Creating our own curriculum
People need to build their own curriculum to realise their potential. From a personal development perspective, 3 factors are needed to create that curriculum: (a) Goals, milestones, skills scale to progress and grow, (b) motivation to reach those goals and (c) the will to embrace new challenges to close the circle and keep the dynamic moving. The goals and milestones are very personal matters, and they are individually set up according to what we personally want to achieve and our own definition of success. Then we need to keep ourselves motivated to reach those goals, learn to be accountable to ourselves and take full responsibility for our successes and our failures. This is all about our relationship with ourselves and becoming our own Life Coach. Finally, the challenges are about embracing the unknown, the uncertainty, the unusual as opportunities.
One common misconception in personal development is that it is self-centred. At the contrary, personal development is putting the Self in relationship with others and the community. Therefore, the technological challenge should not be to artificially create a Coaching device setting the same standardised goals and motivation for everyone, giving pointless medals and heavily relying on quantitative data. It’s already happening in wellness tech and it is showing limitations. The Augmented Intelligence should focus on the offline experience and offer information about how the development of specific intelligence matches real needs and expectations from the Community at any stage. To build a curriculum by being of service to others.
And the reality is that the technology is already used within several industries. In the retail industry, analytics techniques track our behaviour online, our interests and habits to offer us more “personalised” advertisement. Social Media use algorithms to predict the content that we could like and how to customize our experience. The financial industry use algorithm to offer bespoke services based on customers needs, goals, capacity and risk appetite. They all use algorithms to increase people’s engagement. And we answer their call for action because our interest has been aroused with the promise of a positive experience. In the same way, to stay committed to our personal development, we don’t need medals to take action but a deep sense of gratification. And the most powerful gratification is received when we are helping others as scientifically proven.
So what if algorithms could also offer us more suggestions of charities looking for volunteers with our specific talents? Selection of news and articles mentioning how our talents are used in the world? Local communities which need help and support? Empower people with a 360° knowledge of facts and opportunities to use their talents? And empower them to become more citizens of the World with a power to create change rather than just reducing Humankind to customers with a buying power.
Augmented Intelligence to help us find our own purpose
Growing our skills and our potential, and being able to contribute to this World, bring a sense of purpose. The purpose is going to give us a meaning for our life: “As a unique individual, I found my place as a Co-creator on this planet”. Beyond the “what” of building a curriculum, a purpose gives us the “Why” it’s important that we develop those skills and build that curriculum.
Our free will to use our potential becomes a free will to use our potential as a way to give meaning to our life. The purpose is the red thread in the background of our curriculum where our actions should be gravitating so our skills and potential are not wandering. And they would get more powerful and impactful if they are focused. There are infinite ways to make an impact in our lives and in that world. But here is another challenge in our personal development journey: how to find a purpose?
A purpose can be at different scales, from taking care of people to solve global issues. A purpose can be found at any time, very young or later in life. A purpose is unique to us and doesn't rely on others: once the kids are old and left the house, the partner is gone or passed away, or if we lost our job or want to change careers, our purpose is still there because it’s linked to our inborn talents and inner gifts that we can offer to others or for other causes.
We spend the first half of our life looking for our purpose and the second half fulfilling that purpose. No Artificial or Augmented Intelligence can tell us what is our own life purpose but it can offer guidance and avenues to explore based on the collective intelligence, the pattern of our experiences, the (data) visualisation of our interests, personality traits and specificity, and the direction where we seem to be heading. By giving us the full picture of tangible facts in our life, we have the best support to use our intuition to discover our own purpose.
Knowing our purpose is an inside work but data-informed. Today, the combination of Human Intelligence and machine intelligence can not only democratise personal development by making everyone grow with the same level of knowledge and opportunities, and help us find meaning in our lives. But that combination can also make us whole as we are finally empowered to use our rationality but also our intuition and creativity for the coming Creativity era.