Over the course of the past month, I have come to the realization that human connection is the single most important thing one should spend the effort to foster. I will go as far as to say that it is far more difficult to develop deep emotional connections with people than honing technical excellence. In my opinion, the determining factor of being able to develop emotional connections with people is one’s emotional intelligence.

being technical is easy; the ability to feel is not

Being technically excellent is easy. If you have the ability to read this article, you have the ability to become really good at something. with the internet and an llm, you have easy access to all of human knowledge at your fingertip. All you need to do is to digest them and apply them. It takes time and effort, but the path to technical excellence is predictable and linear.

The ability to feel is the ability to understand and feel your emotions deeply. Try to answer the following questions:

• How are you feeling at this very moment?
• Why are you feeling the way you are?
• What is the “stacktrace” of your emotion? (what effects your emotion? what effects that? so on and so forth)

As an additional challenge, try to verbalize your answer rather than merely answering in your head. You will realize it is a lot harder than it seems!

With the ability to understand your internal emotions comes sympathy and ultimately empathy, which is the key to foster emotional connection with someone. You will be able to put yourself in their shoes and truly understand and, most importantly, feel what they are feeling.

the cultural bias towards outward intelligence

I coin the term “outward intelligence”, which is what people think of when they think of “intelligence”: outward behaviors of a person that is perceived as “being intelligent”, for instace, being good at problem solving or being well spoken. Inversely, I define “inward intelligence” as the ability to understand one’s inner self.

This distinction is crucial, for a person cannot be “intelligent” or “smart” if they lack either. Unfortunately, the current culture seems to be significantly biased towards outward intelligence, when in reality emotional intelligence is equally important. This is easily verified by noticing that, for instance, that the adjectives “intelligent” or “smart” is dominantly defined by a person’s outward behavior (hence “outward intelligence”) and that IQ always dominates online discourse, at least on twitter.

developing emotional intelligence

This naturally leads to the question - how do i develop emotional intelligence? While i am not able to offer professional advice, I can offer some pointers, drawn from anecdotal experiences:

feel your emotions

The worst thing to do to yourself is to surpress and ignore your emotions. “It is fine” or “I don’t care anyways” are common phrases when your brain is trying to surpress your emotions. Instead, let your emotions out - feel it, understand it, trace it. Emotions are like problems - they don’t just go away if you ignore them; instead they pile up until they become too much to deal with.

find your connections

Emotional intelligence and human connections has a symbiotic relationship. To develop emotional intelligence, you need to develop connections with other people. Try to move your conversations beyond the surface level. Then, you will have the opportunity to verbalize your emotions. You will be bad at it at first, but this forces you to understand your emotions better, which makes you better at verbalizing them. As your understanding of your own emotions grow, your empathy also develops, which strengthens your connections with others.

final thank you note

If you are reading this and we have met before - from the bottom of my heart, I will forever be grateful to you for the opportunity to have been able to meet and connect, and I hope we will have the chance to meet again soon.

If you are reading this and we spend time together on a regular basis - know that mere words can’t begin to express my unwavering gratitude towards you, that I will forever be in debt to you, and that I wish for us to be a never ending chapter of our lives.