Self-knowledge is an important part of development.

Learning about yourself can be challenging.

Development involves acknowledging and accepting the unappealing parts of yourself.

I recently published a paper that presents a model of personal and professional development focused on gaining self-knowledge. Implicit in the model is that acquiring self-knowledge is beneficial and should lead to desirable outcomes such as wisdom, well-being and psychological adjustment.

However, another paper just came out demonstrating that self-knowledge is virtually unrelated to psychological adjustment. The authors of the article defined adjustment as “adaptive functioning in personal and social life” and after reviewing the available research, concluded that “the results do not support the idea that self-knowledge, in its various contents and types, is a general predictor of well-being or interpersonal functioning.”

How do we square this circle? It seems almost obvious that self-knowledge will help us thrive both personally and interpersonally. For example, as we grow older we tend to learn more about our individual strengths, weaknesses, and behavioral tendencies. As we come to recognize and accept these aspects of........

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