This is a very simple tutorial that will take you very little energy and even less time to execute but before I continue, I want to tell you about this incident I have just witnessed on the road.
This Prado was moving a bit slowly on the fast lane and there was a line of smaller cars behind it. All of a sudden, a driver in a black VW-Polo-looking vehicle cut quickly in between the Prado and the vehicle behind it and managed, rather predictably, to hit the Prado from behind despite his furious braking and break something, probably a radiator. This is typicaly what happens on Nairobi roads.
With that minor distraction, I would like to continue.
Human beings are gifted with a large amount of brain power, which we have labelled intellect. We are also generally aware of its amounts in ourselves, and can assess how much or how little of it we have. We call it self-awareness.
When we apply our intellect to various situations, we tend to call it smartness depending on the context, which is generally classroom or technical smartness (book-smarts) or interpersonal and/or situational smartness (street-smarts). People with higher levels of each type of smartness tend to look down upon people of the other type of smartness for various reasons which I will not go into but would like to note that street-smart people tend to make better businesspeople and are also more likely to abuse and/or exploit other human beings while book-smart people tend to be abused and/or exploited more but may be economically better-off than many street-smart people in a politico-economic system that does not work.
Either way, knowing one's strengths can be generally considered to be good and if you know you are smart, you are one step closer to success.
The problem comes in when you start thinking you are clever. Oh, wait. This is not a problem. You want to die, remember?
When you think you are clever, you start doing things which are foolish, like entering conflicts which are not your own like the Americans, violating or bypassing reasonable laws and laws of nature, being impatient like many Nairobi drivers, and generally being short-sighted.
Furthermore, you start making basic mistakes, making assumptions (both of these despite your level of expertise), overlooking or despising trivial-looking data and/or events, and doing things without thinking about potential consequences and/or interactions with other things.1
I might have given a few examples, but I realise this article is so general in scope that if I do that, someone will say, "Ooh this does not cover event X or Y or Z because somehow what I am telling you about is special." It is not.
Last and most importantly, thinking you are clever introduces a little thing called pride, or hubris if you are feeling like breathing out with your mouth wide open. When you are proud, your head becomes bigger and bigger until it becomes too heavy for you to carry, and you fall as a result. Pride also predisposes you to conditions mentioned above and also makes you repugnant to other people. Apart from that, it makes you do things beyond your capability because you think you have a point to prove to others or that you are the only one who can do it. One natural result of that is that people will also deny you help when you need it and as a result, you die.