Can you be too self-aware for your own good?

The upside of being modestly deluded

Excerpt: "Few traits are more celebrated than self-awareness, broadly defined as the ability to know or understand yourself.

And yet, self-awareness is surprisingly rare. Perhaps this is why we worship and cherish it so much, precisely because it doesn’t exist in abundance. Like punctual trains or humble leaders, its absence only seems to increase our collective obsession with it.

In fact, evolutionary psychologists have a persuasive explanation: there are clear survival advantages to not knowing yourself, especially your limitations (or as corporate HR calls them, “development opportunities”). After all, if you truly knew how incompetent you were, you might never leave your bed, let alone apply for that senior leadership role.

Consider this: if you are unaware of your shortcomings, you will convince others (and sometimes yourself) that you are better than you really are. Robert Trivers, in The Folly of Fools, showed how self-deception can be a social weapon: delusions of grandeur are not just self-fulfilling, they are contagious."