Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: Why does German even have a word for “self-knowledge” when it already has a word for “knowledge”? Dr. Yasemin Yazan, Jürgen and Layla dig into the crucial difference between merely knowing something and truly realizing it, land on self-knowledge as a lifelong process rather than a fixed state, and ask an uncomfortable question: how far can self-observation alone actually get you without outside feedback? Along the way: gut feeling decoded into experience plus feedback, a child’s struggle to name what makes them unlike anyone else, and why the mirror we choose to see ourselves in matters more than we think.
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
Yasemin opened with today’s topic: Action and Self-Knowledge. To what extent does self-knowledge play a role in relation to action — that’s the question they wanted to explore today, continuing the self-management competency deep-dive they’d begun the day before. She invited everyone to bring impulses, thoughts, experiences and examples to help shape a shared reflective space, reminded newcomers the room was recorded and would be published, and repeated the three room rules: a recognizable profile photo, first and last name, and at least one sentence in the bio — or, alternatively, contributing via chat.
Jürgen opened, joking it had taken some effort to get himself onto the stage today, greeting Layla and Sabine in the audience, and saying he wanted to do things a little differently than usual by storming the stage first, specifically to sound a warning: the term “self-knowledge” offers a wealth of angles for discussion, particularly around distinguishing it from other concepts like “knowledge” itself. He recalled they’d had a related, somewhat contentious but ultimately fruitful discussion before, in the context of their overarching theme of knowledge, about the concept of insight/realization (“Erkenntnis”) — and he wanted to flag upfront that this particular term deserves careful attention.
Yasemin thanked him, noting that’s exactly why they were here today, and welcomed Layla. Layla thanked Jürgen for jogging her memory, recalling their earlier distinction between mere “knowing of” something (Kenntnis) and genuine “insight/realization” (Erkenntnis) — just because I know something doesn’t mean I’ve truly grasped or realized it. She connected this to self-knowledge and action: the better I know myself, the better I can judge my own actions. She recalled Jürgen saying the day before that we can’t help but judge, or maybe we always can judge — to which she’d responded that perhaps we’re mirrors for each other, projection surfaces, and precisely because of what we are, others can see themselves reflected in us. Coming back to self-knowledge: if action is a suit, self-knowledge is the fit of that suit, and the coach becomes the tailor — the better I know myself, the better I can use a method a coach offers or invites me to try, since I know how to make it fit me. That’s why she considers self-knowledge so important — though some, taken to the extreme, might say too much self-examination becomes pure rumination, overthinking, even paralysis. Those were her opening thoughts.
Yasemin thanked her warmly, and Jürgen jumped back in, thanking Layla explicitly for reminding him of something he’d once said — what better way to start a day than being reminded of your own words by someone else. He wanted to add another layer on top, regarding how to frame the topic: he personally sees insight/realization and self-knowledge as an essential determining factor, or target outcome, of self-reflection. Playfully provocative, he noted he could argue this topic actually belongs under “reflection” rather than “action” — not entirely accurate, since it does relate to action too, but for him it operates on an absolute meta-level: to reach insight, I have to ask how I even arrive at insight in the first place — and his answer is through reflection, through thinking about how I think, examining myself, questioning certain positions and reordering them, which hopefully leads to self-knowledge. He added one more point, building on Layla’s earlier remark about the prefix “er-” in German: any word carrying that prefix signals a process. Take “leben” (to live) versus “erleben” (to experience) — living is a state, experiencing is a process. What does this mean for self-knowledge (“Selbsterkenntnis”)? That self-knowledge isn’t a state but a process — a lifelong process we’re always within, one that, at any given moment of reflection, arrives at a recognized state, but that state won’t stay fixed, since we keep developing and everything around us keeps developing too. Insight, in his view, is a constant, lifelong process closely tied to something they’d often discussed before: learning is also a lifelong process. This closed an important circle for him.
Yasemin thanked him and wanted to return to the terms “self-knowing” (Selbstkenntnis) and “self-knowledge/insight” (Selbsterkenntnis), bringing in some definitions, including English terms, to see whether that sharpens or muddies the distinction. On self-recognition: Wikipedia describes “mirror self-recognition” as the ability of a living being to recognize itself in a mirror — itself an indicator that the being is self-aware, able to distinguish itself from others of its kind. Looking at “Selbsterkenntnis” specifically, the Dorsch Lexicon of Psychology lists the English “self-knowledge/awareness”: the turning of cognition toward one’s own self, one’s self as a shaped and enduring conception, examined through personal experience regarding one’s own traits, behavior, dispositions, abilities, attitudes, and motivations. And Wikipedia’s entry specifically on “Selbsterkenntnis” describes it as a person’s insight into their own self, closely related to self-reflection (thinking about oneself) and self-criticism (critically questioning and judging one’s own thinking, positions, and actions). She asked what everyone thought.
Jürgen said this illustrates, in his view, the sheer multi-layeredness with which one can approach these terms — and he happily engages critically with such varied perspectives, especially when framed in another language. He picked up two of Yasemin’s points: the prefix pattern in “self-” compound words, which he’d started digging into intensely the day before, and the wide range of interpretation around “Erkenntnis” (insight). Sticking to his own process-based definition, he stressed one thing clearly: this comes down to a deeply personal, individual view — not an attempt to dodge a precise definition, but simply an acknowledgment that his own understanding of self-knowledge doesn’t have to match Yasemin’s or Layla’s, much like truth itself only ever really exists between two people — his understanding of self-knowledge need not be identical to theirs.
Yasemin thanked him and turned to Layla, who reflected on which term she personally preferred — “self-awareness” sounded appealing at first, evoking attentiveness, but then she noticed it’s usually translated as “Selbstbewusstsein” (self-confidence/consciousness), which made her wonder about the difference between that and “Selbsterkenntnis.” In everyday usage, she suggested, self-confidence tends to be framed as a strength, while self-knowledge is also a strength but a more neutral, process-oriented one — confidence being more of a state, insight being a process. She said her preferred term would actually be “self-attentiveness” (Selbstaufmerksamkeit), since insight is something beautiful, and she remains a strong believer that self-knowledge is genuinely valuable. Recalling Jürgen once quoting Heraclitus — you can never step into the same river twice — she believes the same applies to ourselves, which is exactly why we need to stay attentive, which is why she’d personally christen it “self-attentiveness.”
Yasemin thanked her, noting that with “self-awareness,” if we transfer it to a related concept — “situational awareness,” which they’d touched on before in other contexts — it’s partly about mindfulness: paying attentive attention to oneself, observing oneself, which brings us right back to self-reflection, and whatever that ultimately means in practice: perhaps knowing one’s own strengths and weaknesses, but also asking the big relevant questions — who am I, what do I want, where do I stand, and so on. Countless questions open up here over time, and again we’re dealing with a process — it requires a process of self-discovery, gathering different experiences, which ties back to the concept of experience they’d touched on in their earlier “insight” room too: I need reference points, which is why this is bound to a temporal process. As they’d established before, my current level of insight into something today might look different than it did yesterday, the day before, three weeks or three months ago — and that same level of insight could well look different again three months from now, since it’s always tied to accumulated experience and how I evaluate it in the moment, which then gets reintegrated into the overall neural network of experiences, information, and knowledge stored within me. She invited Jürgen to continue.
Jürgen picked this up eagerly, since it bridged to his second major point of terminological discussion: given the prefix “er-,” why isn’t it called “self-knowledge” (Selbstwissen) instead of “Selbsterkenntnis”? He recalled they’d established a wide definitional range around “knowledge” before, but broadly agreed, at the meta-level, that knowledge concerns a kind of disposal-power over facts and phenomena. “Erkenntnis” (insight), in his view, contains knowledge as a subset, but insight connects that knowledge — and this is, for him, a sign that goes beyond mere knowledge — by bringing this relatively loosely held knowledge into very specific contexts, within a reflection process concerning myself, my self-image and positioning, drawing specifically on experiential knowledge. The essential difference between the two terms, for him, is that knowledge tends to represent a momentary state, while insight represents a continuous process that generates itself from knowledge but, shaped by one’s life experience and current situation, generates new connections — potentially even concluding that knowledge previously held wasn’t actually correct. He thanked Yasemin for a genuinely fitting segue into the complexity of self-knowledge.
Yasemin thanked him and invited Layla to continue. Layla said she’d been thinking about what action within self-knowledge could even look like, distinguishing it from self-optimization to find the difference: self-knowledge, unlike consciousness/awareness alone, doesn’t necessarily aim to change anything — I might be aware that I dislike changing my opinion (which, framed negatively, could be called stubbornness), and I could choose to optimize that if I have self-awareness, or I could simply say “no, I’m just consistent in my views” and leave it be. Self-knowledge would mean observing this example, seeing it, and recognizing it as true — even at the risk that it’s a negative trait — and then, tying back to Jürgen’s point, deciding whether to move into self-optimization or simply recognize and accept it as self-confidence. She knows people with traits she personally wouldn’t braid into her own “laurel wreath,” so to speak, who are nonetheless very self-aware and confident about those very traits.
Yasemin thanked her, and noted this connected to the next question she’d have asked anyway, tying back to today’s core question: to what extent does self-knowledge play a role in relation to action? She invited Jürgen to build on this specifically. Jürgen said one has to approach it from the resulting output of this insight process — treating it as part of, or an essential aspect of, our thinking process, specifically arising from self-reflection and thinking about oneself — which then essentially serves as a precursor to action. He saw one particularly important point here: treating self-knowledge as a routine — not necessarily daily, but something one deliberately builds into a recurring practice of self-reflection under the banner “know thyself,” specifically in order to break existing routines. In other words, he uses this routine of self-reflection to hopefully recognize which routines, positive or negative, he’s currently caught in — connecting strongly back to unconscious bias, the quick, ready-made solutions our associative brain offers us, which can lead us to act in completely wrong ways. That’s why self-knowledge, for him, is a necessary routine specifically to break other routines.
Yasemin thanked him, and raised a follow-up: what happens in reverse — if I lack sufficient self-knowledge, what’s the consequence for action? Do I then not act, or act differently? She invited Layla to weigh in. Layla said the risk is repeatedly running into the same challenges, since without examining the underlying process, I just notice something isn’t working, try again, it still doesn’t work, try again — concluding either I’m an idiot or everyone else is. But with self-knowledge, I can actually examine that process and identify possible causes, adjusting specific levers, or ruling certain factors out, allowing me to initiate real change. Without it, I’m not stuck because I’m stupid, but because I can’t examine the process in detail — I only see the outcome. She’d call herself results-oriented rather than process-oriented in that case.
Yasemin thanked her and invited Jürgen’s take. Jürgen said her question led him right back to the concept of “self” itself — what actually constitutes “self”? If asked what happens without self-knowledge or self-reflective effort, his short answer: I don’t know my own self, since that’s literally embedded in the word “Selbsterkenntnis” — insight into one’s own self. Which raises the deeper question: what is “self”? He admitted this has been one of his favorite topics since the day before, and he hadn’t yet reached a firm conclusion, but offered three anchor points for how he’d currently define “self”: it’s a conglomerate of one’s emotions (or better, feelings), one’s reason and capacity for thought, and one’s behavior — behavior being a crucial output shaped significantly by one’s surrounding environment. Behavior, emotion, and reason: that, currently, is his working status on reflecting what “self” actually is. And his answer to Yasemin’s question: without self-knowledge, I recognize neither my behavior, nor my emotions, nor my reason.
Yasemin thanked him and invited Layla to continue, noting a follow-up question had immediately occurred to her: given that Jürgen had brought in unconscious bias, and they’d already partly discussed this — don’t we also need feedback from outside, beyond self-reflection alone, to recognize certain things? If I never get outside feedback and remain stuck in my own bubble, how far can I really get through pure self-observation alone, given the unconscious biases at play? She suggested first letting Layla respond to the “self” question, since she’d wanted to add something there, before returning to this feedback question.
Layla said she could perhaps tie both threads together. She regularly teaches identity within ethics classes, and had been thinking about the imagery we use around “self” — often depicting it as an empty shell one fills in, like puzzle pieces. When you ask children who they are, they know exactly who they are — that’s exactly Yasemin’s point — they simply say “I’m just me.” Ask what makes them them, what distinguishes them from others, what they share with others, and they start with things like “I’m just me, I have brown hair” — and they often need that outside perspective, not because they don’t know who they are, but because they don’t know why they’d need to describe it in the first place, and finding the words is genuinely hard. That’s where those “if others described you” exercises help — they assign traits, giving children a framework to work with. The question is whether that framework is itself imposed, since it reflects societal norms — if you ask someone alone, they eventually arrive at their own traits, but often what they describe first is what they share with others; identifying what makes them uniquely different from others is much harder to uncover on one’s own initially.
Yasemin thanked her and invited Jürgen, who immediately signaled wanting to continue. Jürgen said Yasemin had made an essential contribution to his quest to understand “self,” effectively closing (or having already closed) the last open flank in this terminological discussion: recalling their earlier reflection and self-reflection room, self-clarity doesn’t necessarily require going it alone — self-reflection can absolutely happen with the support of an external coach, or someone close to you who knows you well. So her positioning, if he recapped correctly, was that it doesn’t have to come purely from oneself, but can also draw on outside help — which he agreed was a crucial point, and a new building block connecting to his earlier third anchor point about “self”: behavior, which he’d said is shaped by our environment. The result of self-reflection about oneself, conducted with the help of a coach or friend, can therefore be quite different from self-reflection conducted entirely alone.
Yasemin thanked him, and reframed her question slightly: not just whether outside feedback is needed, but to what extent it might actually be essential — in whatever form — echoing Martin Buber’s idea, which they’d discussed before, that a person becomes an “I” through encountering a “you.” She asked how they’d connect that here.
Jürgen connected it to a concept they’d discussed often: gut feeling. Both Marc and Yasemin, he noted, have pointed out how much we decide based on emotion, on this so-called gut feeling, rather than reason. Examining what gut feeling actually consists of — a topic they’d touched on before — he identified two key underlying factors shaping our action significantly: first, experience — frequent, repeated action bordering on routine, something done again and again until it becomes normal, anchoring itself far more firmly as a decision-making factor for future action than something experienced only once. Second — and here his thanks went to Yasemin for the feedback point — is exactly that: feedback. I can do something a thousand times, but if I get no feedback, no confirmation, I lack the motivation to keep doing it. This ties directly back to their theme of insight: one of the key reflective dimensions, alongside how I behave, what goals I have, and how I see myself, is also what actually motivates me — itself an output of this insight process.
Yasemin thanked him and invited Layla to continue. Layla said she’d add that whether the “I” emerges from the “you,” or the “you” from the “I” — she finds that phrasing beautiful, since she believes we mirror ourselves in the face of the other, and we should choose carefully whose face we mirror ourselves in. A nice thought experiment: imagine being a hermit raised entirely alone in the desert, with no one around — would you be the same person you are now? She said the answer is no. Thinking back to typical student answers, family and friends come up constantly — “I am the way I am,” sure, but someone likely told her that at some point too. The real question is whether I choose to accept and internalize it, whether it actually rings true for me. That’s why she believes we genuinely need others — we should just make sure to examine whose reflection we’re looking at. She recalled once being told an action she’d taken wasn’t very nice, framed as “that’s just society’s mirror” — to which she’d responded, “well, maybe that mirror needs a clean.”
Yasemin thanked her, and picked up the concept of feedback specifically: feedback doesn’t necessarily mean someone deliberately, actively giving you feedback — it’s any form of resonance reflected back at us. As they’d discussed before (we cannot not communicate), even a gesture or facial expression counts as feedback — it doesn’t require someone sitting down specifically to give you verbal feedback because they were asked or assigned to. Virtually any imaginable form of response counts. She found Layla’s closing point especially interesting given the current situation with Israel and Palestine/Hamas — though countless other examples exist too, including things they’d discussed before around extremism, whether right-wing or any other direction, anything pushed to an extreme. Layla’s “maybe the mirror needs cleaning” comment struck her as fascinating here — without wanting to go political, if a child grows up in an environment repeatedly confronted with certain things, where the feedback received is consistently framed within a particular context, and given that humans are social beings dependent on feedback to recognize and question things through self-knowledge, this shapes their behavior accordingly.
She continued: naturally, changing one’s action still requires motivation — wanting to change how one acts — but looking at virtually any country or context, we take so many things for granted that aren’t actually a given everywhere. She used the example they’d discussed before: the ability to simply leave one’s country, travel elsewhere, experience other cultures — something many people simply don’t have access to, facing borders they’re not permitted to cross, growing up in a fixed environment with barely any way to leave it, constantly receiving feedback reflected back within that same narrow context, which shapes their action or behavior accordingly. This doesn’t justify certain things, but it illustrates the sheer complexity involved — whether looking at war zones, or simply the neighbor next door. Even close to home, there are at least some possibilities for change — schools, for instance, share responsibility for opening up different perspectives. External circumstances shifting, moving into different environments, can open and reveal new perspectives, especially against the backdrop of “learning to learn” in relation to self-reflection — but the more restricted these possibilities are, the harder and more challenging it becomes to work with. She used the image of a newborn baby as essentially a blank recording medium, receiving imprints from outside, and along those resonance points and accumulated experiences, this neural network develops — and from then on, all of one’s thoughts and actions exist in continuous feedback loops with that neural network, drawing on whatever anchor points happen to be available. Which anchor points are actually available is exactly where this becomes genuinely fascinating, revealing the sheer complexity embedded in this topic.
She invited Jürgen and Layla to weigh in. Layla said she found this an important theme, since it’s wonderful that we can learn throughout our whole lives — these processes happening especially in young people can also happen later, though sometimes that horizon isn’t as wide due to limited experiences: what I see and hear all day becomes my reality, and if I’m surrounded by the same neighborhood and the same people every day, that’s worth being mindful of, choosing carefully who you surround yourself with when you have that choice. What she finds beautiful, though, is that she genuinely believes people can change their behavior — not that bad people become good people overnight, since making a mistake once is a mistake, making it repeatedly becomes a bad habit, and doing it constantly makes you, arguably, a “bad person” in some framing — but children, and adults too, remain highly capable of learning, and offering new impulses and stimuli can genuinely change things. Of course, this isn’t a courtroom excuse (“he had a hard childhood, so that’s just who he is”) — that’s not an excuse, but it is a reason why things are the way they are, and embedded in that is hope: that things can change. She believes that’s exactly how we should see it — not as an excuse being sought, but hope being sought, hope that people can change, that this can hold true for many people, and that we can all coexist in a way that’s genuinely good, since there’s nothing worse than the alternative — conflict is difficult, war is hell, and it’s good to hold onto that hope.
Yasemin thanked her, and invited Jürgen, who picked up on Layla’s use of “understanding” specifically: understanding means comprehending, which is by no means the same as accepting or tolerating — an important distinction, and one that, paired with the concept of insight, opens the window for an entirely separate future room in his view. Sticking to their concept of insight and its distinction from knowledge and understanding: insight, for him, is essentially defined by the additional quality — beyond mere command of information and phenomena — of perceiving something as correct. Not necessarily as true, mind you, but as correct for oneself. If I know something, I can reproduce it; if I’ve reached insight about something, I’ve concluded it’s correct for me. The second essential point, which for him closes the circle back to today’s pressing social issues, is that this is increasingly driven by growing conviction — reinforced by corresponding feedback, this collision between different societal structures (school, for instance, versus home life, as Layla mentioned). This, in his brief framing, is a phenomenon requiring deep analysis and deliberate untangling: how do we get a handle on this, how can we turn insight built on personal conviction and a felt sense of “rightness” into its opposite? One of the essential process steps, for him, is simply knowing this instrument of self-knowledge and self-reflection exists in the first place — which is why, in matters of education, the essential support role played by professionals whose job it is to advance exactly this topic becomes crucial. He currently sees no other way out of this dilemma.
Yasemin thanked him, saying they truly couldn’t have brought together more facets and perspectives in 60 minutes, and she was thoroughly delighted. She moved into the closing round, previewing tomorrow’s topic: Action and Goals — looking at the relevance of goal management within the context of action. She noted how many doors they keep opening across these rooms, going deep enough to draw out real insights each time, even though the sheer diversity and complexity of each topic could easily fill three days of discussion on its own — though she felt they’d reached a meaningful depth today too, especially given how many recurring concepts and threads from earlier rooms they could weave together and bridge.
Before forgetting, she reminded everyone: this coming Sunday, they’d be meeting not on Clubhouse but on X Spaces — the link was in today’s newsletter for anyone subscribed, and she’d try to pin it here too while Jürgen and Layla gave their closing thoughts, and would remind everyone again tomorrow regardless. She invited everyone to join, findable under both her own name and “Deep Talk,” noting that at 8am, room competition there still tends to be manageable, making it findable. The goal for Sunday was simply to try out the platform’s features together, gain some initial experience, and discuss how it felt — deliberately chosen for a Sunday so people wouldn’t be commuting to work or client meetings at the same time. She asked anyone not yet on X (formerly Twitter) to at least download the app beforehand, and, as always, to have a profile photo, first/last name, and a bio entry ready — noting listening is possible even without downloading the app, but participating requires it.
She invited Jürgen and Layla to share their closing thoughts, while she tried to pin the link in the meantime. Jürgen said he’d keep it brief: he was thoroughly delighted with today’s room, closing, half-joking, that he could finally stop breaking into a cold sweat over not knowing what he doesn’t know — a genuinely constructive and enriching exchange, with heartfelt thanks to Layla and to Yasemin for moderating. As a closing note, slightly wistful, he added: one can only hope Mr. Musk doesn’t follow through on one of his increasingly emotional impulses and, from one day to the next, switch off X for Europe, which he apparently seems to be considering. He wished Yasemin well with her ongoing planning, offering his support, and wished everyone a nice day.
Yasemin thanked him warmly, agreeing that remains a genuinely tense open question — something she’d already touched on in preparing for an upcoming digital campfire session specifically on this topic in relation to action. She recalled many similar discussions when Clubhouse first launched or re-established itself — big changes always come with real turbulence, and she sees various angles worth examining here too: whose interests are actually being served, what kind of power play is unfolding. She finds it fascinating to watch, and doesn’t necessarily see it all the way the media portrays it — she wants to genuinely explore this with everyone, and would use the digital campfire the following Sunday (not this coming one) to share her own perspective and hear everyone’s views.
She invited Layla to close. Layla said she’d initially wanted to say “language shapes reality,” then considered using her mother’s words instead — “it’s never eaten as hot as it’s cooked” (a German saying meaning things usually turn out less dramatic than feared) — or maybe quoting her boss’s “where there’s planing, there are shavings” — but then realized language is also comforting. What she took from today’s room, besides a warm feeling and plenty of great insights and words, was genuinely a new term for her: she finds “self-knowledge” beautiful, and appreciates that, unlike “self-acceptance,” it doesn’t require actually liking what you find — that’s her own distinction, Jürgen. But she said she’d already told Yasemin in chat that she finds the term “self-mindfulness” (Selbstachtsamkeit) especially lovely, since it evokes walking barefoot mentally with oneself, testing different terrains, simply being mindful toward one’s own mind — something beautiful that can lead to insight.
Yasemin thanked her, noting this connected back to their earlier discussion of “management” the day before, where it became clear how strongly the term gets tied to the professional/work context, leading some to feel put off by the word “management” itself, associated with efficiency or optimization. She found this lovely, since it always comes down to how we frame terms, and how we might reinterpret them for ourselves — what do we actually understand by them? The moment we bring in alternative terms, or come to recognize that a concept holds far more than the connotation we might have stored somewhere, we start to see the full diversity and range of what falls under it. Applied to self-knowledge/self-awareness/self-mindfulness, suddenly entirely new directions of thought open up, revealing things that fit here that we might not have noticed before — and that alone makes this kind of reframing of terms genuinely valuable in many places. She said she was looking forward to tomorrow morning at 8am, whoever has the time and inclination to join, and hoped many people would join by Sunday at the latest, when they’d try out X Spaces’ features together and share their first impressions. With that, she wished everyone well, and hoped to see them tomorrow. Ciao.
