Finally figuring out that you’re abnormal is akin to coming home from work and realizing that your shirt was on backwards the entire day, you wonder how many other people noticed it and didn’t say anything. I get that same feeling when I figure out that something I thought was totally normal and that everyone did was actually something that only a very few people possessed.

When I was small, I always imagined there was another me, floating roughly 3 feet behind me and above my head, looking down on me. This wasn’t an imaginary friend or an out of body experience or anything like that, it was just the part of me that lived outside of my body and could observe the world from a different perspective. The inside me would be worried about how I was feeling and my own emotional reactions but the outside me was completely indifferent to my well being and was the hyper-logical, hyper-rational being who would crunch the numbers and present the truth in an impersonal manner. Inside me and outside me would argue a lot and outside me would never win but I would at least respect his opinions. It took me until I was maybe 17 or 18 before I realized that the reason why my appeals to the outside them was not working for most people was because their outside them didn’t exist and they were unable to consider an argument from anything but a personal perspective. Because I had an outside me, I thought everyone else must have an outside them as well.

One recent skill I finally figured out not many people had is the ability to learn about a subject without subscribing to the orthodox view and it took me the recent financial crisis to hammer that home to me. When I first learned economics, I came into it enthusiastic but well aware of it’s limitations and simplifications. Surely, if I could see how economics was limiting from a high school class, these professionals with their fancy educations must be very well versed in just what the flaws and deficiencies in their subject was. It wasn’t until this crisis hit that it finally hit home to me the level of intellectual shallowness and mindlessness most economic professionals were operating under. Sure, they knew the theory and how to apply it but they also believed that, because they knew it, it was true.

Knowing that you have a skill is useful but finding out that other people don’t have that skill is infinitely more powerful because it makes you unique. However, finding such things out generally requires a jolt out of your normal circumstances. I’m really curious to see if any other people have stories about discovering unusual abilities?

I’m reading a book right now which I’ll name in a later post which contains, roughly according to my estimate, about 80% wisdom to 20% bullshit and it strikes me that this is the absolutely worst ratio possible. In fact, making a mental list of wisdom:bullshit ratios made me think how highly non-linear my personal scale is. So here it is from best to worst:

• 90:10 – These are the books I most enjoy reading as the amount of bullshit is just enough for you to calibrate your filter and be able to extract out the deep wisdom hidden within. I would say Freakanomics would fit squarely into this category.
• 100:0 – Although, intuitively, you would think a book with no bullshit is better than a book with some bullshit, it’s actually not because you now no longer have a scale of comparison. Did you not detect bullshit because it wasn’t there or because it was too advanced for you to understand? I don’t think I’ve read any books that fall squarely in this category, at least not for a long time.
• 0:100 - Simple, skim a couple of pages and throw it away, your life remains unaffected. The Secret would be a good book of this category.
• 50:50 – These books are challenging and require you to have your bullshit filter on full force. You’re forced to comb through every sentence and carefully consider each statement. Such books can often cause you to radically shift your thinking or at least inject doubt into your process. The 48 laws of power was a book like that for me.
• 30:70 / 40:60 / 60:40 /70:30 – For the most part, this will be largely everything you read. Most mass media falls into this comfortable middle range and, although it’s challenging to parse properly, you become so used to doing it that it’s routine.
• 10:90 / 20:80 – These books are frustrating because there’s a hidden core of wisdom surrounded by so much utter crap that they’re emotionally draining to read and yet the small insights urge you to keep going. Atlas Shrugged was definitely in that category for me. I hated it so much, I inexplicably read it again a few years later, gritting my way through the entire book.
• 80:20 – The 80:20 book is the book that derails people’s lives. Mixed in among all that wisdom is just a few key mistakes that can lead you far, far astray. This is how cults recruit their members and smart financial wizards managed to argue their way into this financial crisis. The wisdom is compelling enough that you let down your guard and don’t realize how much bullshit you let in until it’s too late. I’ll be providing a review of the current book I’m reading in a few days with the case of why I believe it to be an 80:20 book.

In the meantime, I’d like to hear your examples of books you think fit into any of the above categories…