Humans are more naturally interested in relatable subjects … such as art, games, music, and dancing. These entertaining activities are foundational to what makes life enjoyable. They are easily relatable to children because all children can engage and immediately appreciate the value of “The Arts”. No teacher is required to explain why we listen to music or how to enjoy cheering on a local sports team. Humans have been dancing and painting together for thousands of years...long before the modern day concepts of “school” or “teacher” had meaning.
The Arts are very important to living a full and happy life and growing meaningful relationships. But in and of themselves The Arts can be a challenging place to make a living. This is in part because these activities are so naturally enjoyable. Another is that anyone can learn to do them … which is why they are so “relatable” … a key driver of what makes The Arts so much fun! At WEquil.School we encourage kids to use their natural love of The Arts to get really good at writing, speaking, and creating projects. By doing this they become more confident … and this is how we bridge the gap and help them develop creative intelligence.
Learning how to leverage your natural interests in these things to add value is extremely useful. But how can you start to cultivate your interests into things that are harder such as STEM? How can you grow your curiosity in the transition period from Creative Intelligence to Intellectual intelligence?
First, what is Creative and Intellectual Intelligence? Creative Intelligence is the ability to take things that are naturally very interesting and turn them into projects that add value to others. There is an abundance of young people interested in games, creating artwork, and other more creative interests, but not very many of them take the step to share their work with others and take the things that they already enjoy creating and make them into projects that add value. As you can see Creative Intelligence is very important, and is an easy way for young people to start sharing their work with others since the projects are based on their interests.
Intellectual Intelligence is expanding your curiosity into harder subjects that give you a better understanding of how the world works. This will include STEM, and other more hard hitting subjects such as economics, finance and accounting, that require a certain amount of knowledge to get started. This is also a very important pillar to help you grow your understanding of the world, and also because the barrier to entry for these fields is a lot higher because not everyone can start doing things within these fields without some research.
Obviously Intellectual Intelligence is a lot harder to cultivate as many of these subjects are not as naturally interesting. However, it is essential for learning about the world around you, so how can you transition from creative intelligence to intellectual intelligence?
First, I want to mention that transitioning from creative to intellectual intelligence does not mean that you stop creating projects about more naturally interesting things. In fact it is the opposite! It means broadening your interests to other things as well as integrating more subjects within Intellectual Intelligence into your projects within creative intelligence. For example, using software programming to create digital art, or using statistics to evaluate different types of art, and writing a thesis about why certain art is more valuable than others. This is integrating harder subjects into something more naturally interesting like art! The project I just mentioned is just one way you can accomplish this and there are endless creative ways that you can mix these two types of intelligence to create projects.
One reason why subjects within Intellectual Intelligence may be harder for young people to get interested in is because they don’t have context in which to apply the new knowledge. Something that really lights up learning and makes it fun is being able to draw connections between things that you’ve just learned, and things you’ve learned in the past. Young people haven’t had as much time to build up a body of knowledge that they can use as context to whatever new thing they are learning. This is part of what makes the transition hard.
So one tip to transitioning to Intellectual Intelligence is to start learning about a bunch of different things in a bunch of different areas. Try to learn a little bit about everything so you can start drawing connections and create a base amount of knowledge that will also give you hints to what you may want to dive deeper into. Also finding creative ways to tie more hard hitting subjects into what you are naturally interested in is a great way to make creating these projects easier and more enjoyable.
Know that it is a steep learning curve to all of a sudden becoming fascinated with STEM topics and learning about harder things. This will come with going through those first few projects where you aren’t enjoying working on the projects as much until you can start making connections and start to see the value in using Intellectual Intelligence. It’s hard to see the value in it before you become really curious about these things, but you have to see the end goal in mind, and know that these topics become endlessly fascinating if you push through those first few projects that seem endlessly boring at first.
One thing to also talk about is when to transition. You should be in a position where you want to be interested in these topics even if you aren’t at that moment. Also know that although developing Intellectual Intelligence is extremely useful and beneficial there really is no rush. It is also very useful to continue developing your creative intelligence, just know that there are diminishing returns to how much you are actually getting out of it at a certain point. Some adults even haven’t truly developed Intellectual Intelligence and curiosity to more hard hitting topics.
Don’t beat yourself up if these projects are hard at first. It isn’t in our evolution to be fascinated in subjects like statistics and economics. Be patient with yourself and know that it is a journey and really the biggest step you can take is the first of wanting to develop your Intellectual Intelligence.
If you want to learn more about all the different pillars of intelligence, WEquil.School has built out to prepare members of our community for the future economy, check out https://www.wequil.school/.
You may also want to check out a WEquil Live My dad (Mr WEquil) and I did the five pillars of intelligence at this link: WEquil Graduation and The Five Pillars // WEquil Live Ep. 63