Honesty over knowledge

Of what value am I, without my mind? Whether my value is great or small, it exists solely because of the things that I know and how I use them.

Or so was my thinking for most of my life until recently. I recognized that tying my value to my intelligence was not going to be good for me in the long run. There were too many opportunities to be "proven" unintelligent (I use quotation marks because what was necessary was not for my lack of intelligence to actually be proven but only for me to convinced that it was, which is rather different) for me to ever have something stable to stand on.

Worse, what was tied to my self-worth shaped my concerns over my reputation. Did I care whether someone thought that I was too concerned with money? No. I was thrifty, and if it looked differently to someone else then that was their issue. But I did care if I said something- or didn't say something- that led them to judge me as unintelligent. Which led me to behaviors that I didn't approve of, such as sometimes holding back from speaking because I was afraid of being wrong (or of them thinking that I was wrong and never being convinced otherwise).

I finally made a concerted effort to change when I noticed that it was also affecting my ability to change my views, admit defeat, etc. Curiously enough, while this shows to me that even then I placed a higher priority on having beliefs that corresponded with reality, it still took time before I was able to settle on something else to tie my self-worth to.

Thus far (and it's been a couple of months), basing it on honesty hasn't had any bad side effects. Even reputation-based concerns are more helpful than not, because it encourages me to change my views as swiftly as possible when presented with evidence of sufficient quality and quantity, and to speak my mind and volunteer answers readily when questions are asked. I may be wrong, I may look stupid, but no-one can doubt that, if I don't agree with you, it's genuinely because I don't see the evidence for your point of view, not because I'm too prideful to admit a mistake.