Join me, David Kaiser, as we break down the timeless wisdom from Goldman's work and its incredible relevance today.
Key Points from the Episode:
Beginning with a powerful quote from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, we explore the complexities of managing anger and how emotional intelligence can guide us through life's toughest moments.
Hear the gripping story of a high-achieving high school student whose emotional breakdown led to a shocking act of violence, emphasizing the critical need for emotional intelligence in our lives.
This episode promises to provide you with practical applications and reflective insights to help you cultivate a balanced, flourishing life.
Don't miss out on this compelling conversation that blends age-old wisdom with modern psychological understanding, encouraging you to understand and harness your emotional responses for better outcomes.
Want to leave a review? Click here, and if we earned a five-star review from you **high five and knuckle bumps**, we appreciate it greatly, thank you so much!
Join me, David Kaiser, as we break down the timeless wisdom from Goldman's work and its incredible relevance today.
Key Points from the Episode:
Beginning with a powerful quote from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, we explore the complexities of managing anger and how emotional intelligence can guide us through life's toughest moments.
Hear the gripping story of a high-achieving high school student whose emotional breakdown led to a shocking act of violence, emphasizing the critical need for emotional intelligence in our lives.
This episode promises to provide you with practical applications and reflective insights to help you cultivate a balanced, flourishing life.
Don't miss out on this compelling conversation that blends age-old wisdom with modern psychological understanding, encouraging you to understand and harness your emotional responses for better outcomes.
Want to leave a review? Click here, and if we earned a five-star review from you **high five and knuckle bumps**, we appreciate it greatly, thank you so much!
Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser, flourishing life.
Speaker 2:
Now here's your host, david Kaiser. Hello, I am David, and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. Today we're going to explore a book written some 30 years ago but I think is still relevant for us today. In fact I would dare say it's more relevant today than when it was written. The great books have a way of doing that, don't they?
Speaker 2:
Our book of the day is Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goldman. Why it can matter more than IQ. It was written back in 1997. This book was a breakthrough in psychology departments around the world at the time. And, as Goldman says in the opening pages, this book is quote a guide to making sense of the senseless. So with that let's go to our first pull quote. Anyone can become angry, that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, in the right way, that is not easy. So it says Aristotle from the Neomachean Ethics. So it says Aristotle from the Neomachian Ethics. I love that Goldman kicks off this exploration into making sense of the senseless by starting with one of the great classics of all of Western literature, the Neomachian Ethics by Aristotle, perhaps the very first personal development book, right up there with the Old Testament in the strict sense of a quote book. And this book, the Neomachian Ethics, is worth reading, and we should do a study of this book and perhaps an academy review of it, most especially since the classical books seem to be disregarded at a high rate these days. But that is a topic for a different day and a different time.
Speaker 2:
Back to our book of the day Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goldman. Isn't that quote from Aristotle? So true though there's tons of wisdom in just that quote alone. True though there's tons of wisdom in just that quote alone. Anyone can be angry, that's easy. But to be angry with the right person, at the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, in the right way, that is not easy. And we've all known someone or even ourselves, I should say most especially ourselves that have gotten angry and spun up in the heat of the moment and didn't recognize that we were doing that Completely spun up, totally overreacted, probably got angry, all out of sorts, felt embarrassed, felt awful afterwards about our conduct, our actions, our words, knowing full well that we would have to apologize later and make things right for those around us or who we went overboard with in our anger.
Speaker 2:
Now let's go back to the book to hear of an extremely tragic tale. Exactly why David Poligruto, a high school physics teacher, was stabbed with a kitchen knife by one of his star students is still debatable. But the facts as widely reported. Are these still debatable? But the facts as widely reported are these Jason H, a sophomore and a straight-A student at Coral Springs, florida High School, was fixated on getting into medical school. Not just any medical school he dreamt of Harvard. But Poligroto, his physics teacher, had given Jason an 80 on a quiz. Believing the grade a mere B put his dream in jeopardy.
Speaker 2:
Jason took a butcher knife to school and, in a confrontation with Polo Gruto in the physics lab, stabbed his teacher in the collarbone before being subdued in a struggle. A judge found Jason innocent, temporarily insane during the incident. A panel of four psychologists and psychiatrists swore he was psychotic. During the fight, jason claimed he had been planning to commit suicide because of the test score and had gone to Polo Gruto to tell him he was going to kill himself because of the bad grade. Polo Gruto told a different story. I think he tried to completely do me in with a knife because he was infuriated over the bad grade. After transferring to a private school, jason graduated two years later in the top of his class. A perfect grade in regular classes would have given him a straight 4.0 average, but Jason had taken enough advanced courses to raise his grade point average to 4.614, way beyond A-plus range. Even as Jason graduated with the highest honors, his old physics teacher, david Poligruto, complained that Jason had never apologized or even taken responsibility for the attack.
Speaker 2:
The question is how could someone of such obvious intelligence do something so irrational, so downright dumb? The answer academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life. Academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life. The brightest among us can founder on the shoals of unbridled passions and unruly impulses. People with high IQs can be stunningly poor pilots of their private lives. How absolutely awful. The student took no responsibilities for his action, never apologized and then ended up getting off scot-free. Now here's our nugget of wisdom for today.
Speaker 2:
Going back to the book, there are widespread expectations to the myth that IQ predicts success, many or more expectations than cases that fit the rule. At best, iq contributes about 20% to the factors that determine life success, which leaves 80% to other forces. As one observer notes, the vast majority of one's ultimate niche in society is determined by non IQ factors, ranging from social class to luck. Even Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, whose book the Bell Curve imputes primary importance to IQ, acknowledge this, acknowledge this, as they point out. Perhaps, or as they point out, quote, perhaps a freshman with an SAT math score of 500 had better not have his heart set on being a mathematician. But if, instead, he wants to run his own business, become a US senator or make a million dollars, he should not put aside his dreams. The link between test scores and those achievements is dwarfed by the totality of other characteristics that he brings to life. So did you catch that nugget? At best, iq contributes about 20% to the factors that determine life success, which leaves 80% to other forces. 20% versus 80%. 20% is IQ, 80% is EQ, intelligence quotient IQ versus emotional quotient EQ.
Speaker 2:
But here's the hopeful part of all of this. My concern is with a key set of these other characteristics emotional intelligence abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations, to control impulse and delay gratification, to regulate one's moods and keep distress from swamping. The ability to think, to empathize and to hope. Unlike IQ, with its nearly 100-year history of research with hundreds of thousands of people. Emotional intelligence is a new concept. No one can yet say exactly how much of the variability from person to person in life's course it accounts for, but what data exists suggests it can be as powerful and at times more powerful than IQ. And while there are those who argue that IQ cannot be changed much by experience or education, I will show in part five that the crucial emotional competencies can indeed be learned and improved upon by children if we bother to teach them. Ah, we have hope, then. Our emotional intelligence is not repeat, not a fixed personality trait. We can learn and approve upon this. Just as we can help To teach our children these ways, we as adults can also learn. Everything is not etched in stone.
Speaker 2:
Now, what I found fascinating is that Goldman, in my copy, the 25th anniversary of the book being published, helps clear up some mistaken notions around EQ and IQ From the update, the 25th edition. Let's go back to the book to hear about this update, for one, emotional intelligence does not account in individuals for 80% of success. This misconception comes from the misreading of the data suggesting that IQ may account for up to 20% of career success and likely a smaller amount. There are plenty of other factors that add to success apart from EI, emotional intelligence. Then there's the mistaken notion that EI always matters more than IQ. Ei, emotional intelligence, can be more important than IQ when it comes to health and relationships though I've never seen any data showing this but certainly not when it comes to, say, academic achievement.
Speaker 2:
Another wrong-headed view that having emotional intelligence just means that a person is nice, when in fact emotional intelligence could mean a person is blunt or assertive when it comes to expressing unpleasant truths in certain contexts. So you can see that after 25 years, many people take Goldman's teaching from the book and then make it their own and misuse the actual data in what it represents. We saw this happen with another great book, extreme Ownership, by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. They ended up having to write another book, essentially the Dichotomy of Leadership. The book that comes after comes after extreme ownership is the rebalancing of the book extreme ownership, because so many people got the definitions wrong.
Speaker 2:
Now this book offers such great ideas about how we as adults can learn and grow and ultimately have control over our emotional intelligence. Everything is not etched in stone. Like we said Now, this book is worth a tumble if you want to improve your relationships and your health and your experience at your workplace. Most especially, gardering and learning and developing emotional intelligence can help you to be smart rather than dumb around your coworkers. So, in today's Mojo Minute, if you want to improve on your ability to have self-control, and also have zeal and persistence and have the ability to motivate oneself, then I would urge you to pick up this classic Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman and read it, or you can cheat and listen to it on Audible. If you do, your time will be richly rewarded, and so, most especially so, will your emotional intelligence be rewarded. And with that, as always, let's keep fighting the good fight.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.
