Introduction
We live in a society where all things smart and intelligent are good, and anything that is dumb or stupid is bad.
But wait a minute. You probably know at least one brilliant person who is a miserable failure. Worse, you probably know at least one blithering idiot who has risen quickly and easily to the heights of wealth and power. And all too often, they are your boss or your biggest client. What is wrong with this picture?
Strange though it may seem, intelligence is not all that it is cracked up to be. And stupidity, while much maligned, is often a highly effective method of achieving success.
If you constantly find yourself in situations where you are smarter than everyone else, and yet you are doing all the work while the C students are getting all the money and having all the fun, this book is for you.
The concepts in this book are really quite simple. In fact, most of them are about re-acquiring skills you already had when you were two years old. What is not so simple, when reconnecting with the power of stupidity is overcoming the shame and stigma that we normally associate with the word “stupid.”
Once you overcome these negative associations, you will have complete command over the power of this word. This will give you much greater freedom of thought and action. But that is just the beginning; you will also re-discover something you inherently understood when you were three years old: instead of being a source of shame or embarrassment, what you don’t know or understand is a source of unlimited possibility.
The word “stupidity” is based on the Latin word “stupidus,” meaning “to be astonished,” and once you get past your initial negative feelings about this word, you may very well be astonished at what The Principles of Applied Stupidity can do for you.
--JL
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© 2008, Justin Locke. This material may not be reproduced or re-transmitted without permission from the author.