Intelligence Is Domain-Specific. Most People Have Never Applied Theirs to the Domain of Their Own Behavior.
Intelligence doesn't transfer uniformly across domains — someone can be exceptionally sharp at their profession, at strategy, at solving other people's problems, and remain almost entirely unpracticed at applying that same sharpness to the domain of their own recurring behavior. This isn't a contradiction. It's what domain-specificity predicts.
The skills that make someone effective at, say, financial analysis or engineering — pattern recognition, structured thinking, testing hypotheses against evidence — are the exact skills that would also work on one's own behavioral history. They simply haven't been pointed in that direction, because nothing in most people's day prompts that redirection.
This explains an otherwise puzzling observation: people who are demonstrably excellent at recognizing patterns in their professional domain often remain completely blind to an obvious, long-running pattern in their own relationships or decisions — not from lack of capability, but from never having applied that capability to this particular domain.
The intelligence required was rarely missing. What was missing was ever pointing it at the one domain — one's own recurring behavior — that professional and technical skill almost never gets aimed at by default.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai