“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
This quote, first uttered by theoretical physicist Richard Feynman in his address to the 1974 graduating class of Caltech, has been repeated countless times since—and in many X posts like this one LOL.
It’s commonly applied to science and education, but it raises another existential question: how well do you truly know yourself?
Self-improvement is a fifty-billion-dollar-a-year industry, and a good chunk of it is just people trying to understand themselves. Countless assessments, tests, and personality quizzes are available online for free or for pay. Going further back, the ancient Greeks famously carved “know thyself” over the temple of Apollo in Delphi.
It’s obviously an important topic—and a difficult one. But why is that?
Keeping up the storytime theme from my last article, let’s look at the story of McArthur Wheeler and Clifton Earl Johnson.
It’s 1995, and the two criminals are planning to rob a bank and get rich quick—but they can’t figure out how to get around the security cameras.
Then Johnson has the answer. Lemon juice, otherwise known as invisible ink. If it can turn text invisible, then it can turn them invisible too!
Wheeler tests it out. He covers his face in lemon juice and grabs a Polaroid camera. Carefully, hesitantly, he snaps a picture.
He isn’t in it. (Investigators later guessed bad film, or a camera pointed the wrong way.)
Filled with renewed confidence, the masterminds robbed two banks in a single afternoon, faces bare. Months later the surveillance photo ran on the eleven o’clock news. Wheeler was in handcuffs by 12:10am.
This story caught the attention of David Dunning, a professor of social psychology at Cornell.
While everyone else was laughing at the robbers’ ridiculous plan, Dunning was thinking about their self-knowledge. They obviously believed themselves to be quite smart—after all, why had no one else thought of such a plan?
He got together with one of his graduate students, Justin Kruger, and the two got to work. They had their test subjects answer questions about grammar, logic, and telling jokes, then asked them to rate themselves against everyone else. Nearly every group put itself above average—and the people who did worst were the furthest off. The bottom quarter scored around the 12th percentile and guessed they were around the 62nd. The top performers had the opposite problem: they were better than they thought.
Essentially, we have a lot of reasons to protect ourselves from looking below average. Our ego demands it on a subconscious level. Some people spend hours contemplating and introspecting to try to get around this, but even they cannot fully escape it.
Reference bias makes it even easier to misunderstand ourselves. Maybe you think you’re a good communicator, but are you really? Compared to whom?
The result is a subtle, sometimes imperceptible skew in our self-perception. We lean towards the person we want to be and push back against what we don’t want.
In short: we’re too close to ourselves.
Everything we see or take note of is colored by our personal lens, our ego, our surroundings—keeping us blissfully unaware of our own lemon juice moments that hold us back.
So how can we fix that?
The obvious answer is surveillance. Having someone follow you around without your knowledge, documenting your patterns and state of being. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea!??
No, of course not :P
And even if surveillance didn’t seem repellent to the majority of people, it can also miss internal signals like motivations or priorities. It gets us a much better picture of real behaviors and their frequency, but it can’t catch everything.
So what do we do? What is genuinely objective but also deeply personal?
The solution has to start with honesty about what we don’t know. When Richard Feynman said that it’s easiest to fool ourselves, he inspired a system to help us see where our understanding ends: describing our knowledge in simple terms, easy enough that a child could understand.
What’s easier for a child to understand than playing pretend?
Let’s think back to our childhoods: playing house, cops and robbers, games where we learn and discover the rules and functioning of different systems in real life.
Ever since the beginning, we’ve been figuring things out through play, stepping into different roles to understand how we actually think and react. Let’s go back to that.
We can play through scenarios that challenge us to be real, then use those to discover ourselves and understand ourselves without the rose-colored glasses.
The ancient Greeks carved it in stone. Feynman said it to a graduating class. We’re still asking the same question—we just finally have a better way to answer it.
You’ve been working to know yourself your whole life. What if you just needed to play?