Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.

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Chapter 33 of the Tao Te Ching draws a hierarchy that runs against intuition. Reading other people is treated as a skill; reading yourself is treated as wisdom — a higher and rarer category.

The asymmetry is easy to verify. We assess colleagues, competitors and strangers constantly and with reasonable accuracy, while remaining unreliable narrators of our own motives. Self-knowledge is harder precisely because there is no external vantage point and no incentive to reach an unflattering conclusion.