Will the Real Smart People Please Stand Up?1
This post is designed to help readers recognize that unique experiences shape how people spend their time and test scores aren’t everything. When finding a mentor, we should consider a person’s experiences and preferences to better understand how they chose to spend their time. There is no one formula to determining who is smart, and we should work to make ourselves people who others seek to talk with and learn from.
We often hear that it is unwise to be the smartest person in a room (Confucius quote HERE. Madonna also has something to say on the subject).
This isn’t an issue with being smart; rather, the idea is generally that growth is best found in environments that push us to improve, and we should curate those environments by finding a mentor and surrounding ourselves with hardworking, driven, and intelligent people.
One of the major takeaways an ambitious young person might take from this is that they need to critically assess whether the people around them are smart enough for social companionship. While, yes, we should always think carefully about our relationships, this framework asks people to consider whether others are smart enough to warrant interaction. One question:
What makes a person smart?
Taught to Test
We are often conditioned to think that intelligence is directly correlated to quantifiable metrics. GPA, SAT, ACT, LSAT, and MCAT ring through households as standards on which children can gauge their future potentials. These exams are often required for entry into advanced academic programs. If we want to find smart, shouldn’t we look to what schools test?
Standardized tests are useful tools, but alone are insufficient to find smart. We often see standardized tests get a bad reputation because they can be studied and, therefore, tend to be biased in favor of wealthy students with greater access to study materials and support structures. Fair.
I find that standardized testing is most limited in its pursuit of identifying smart because it demands too much time from the curious learner. We have many things we can do with our time, yet life is limited (you will hear this a lot on EfficientlyELITE, check HERE for more). An exam that only tests written math and language competency fails to reflect much of our lives and interests.
When we create intense tests, frame them as the major determining factors for future thought leadership, and make them prerequisites for most advanced schooling, we signal to students that they are essential. However, a young mind’s development, surroundings, interests, and experiences may not translate clearly into a half-day seated examination. A bright mind might also not be best suited to written review. Does that make them less capable, or does this mean that the assessment system is counterproductive?
As a student, we don’t have time to question it. After all, we have an exam to take.
Conditioned to Sort
Chugging along through our academic environments, we can’t help but watch the sorting take place. Our teachers and tests put us in classrooms, and our coaches decide whether we make varsity. We clump with classmates based on extracurriculars and social factors, creating clusters of thought and an echo chamber restricting new idea formation (hot takes can lead to harsh judgment in small groups).
While we are growing, moving, and, of course, sorting our way through young life, we are given constant advice on how to choose better. At the center of our choices is the question of who to befriend.
Our parents want us to spend time with positive influences who will keep us out of trouble, and our teachers want groups with comparable (perceived) academic potentials. Once said and done, we often find our designated friend groups look, think, and act a lot like us.
This isn’t great for productivity.
Diversity of Thought is Key to Growth
Our unique bundle of values, experiences, and social networks play critical roles in defining our perceptions. If we want to better understand the world at scale, it is key that we open ourselves to diverse realms of thought.
Think about it: we determine what we want to do based on our experiences. When we see people in our community struggle with common issues, we may feel compelled to help. From this pursuit of helping, we gain unique experiences, conversations, and failures, which allow us to refine our future problem-solving techniques.
What if we could take those skills and apply them to more diverse problems?
We can. If we interact with a wider array of people, we can see more problems. Importantly, we also see unique problem solving approaches as well as techniques we may implement to address wildly different issues. When we build our knowledge of and access to different ways to accomplish a goal, we can build techniques that might never have come to light if we kept ourselves in the fishbowls our communities tend to create.
Some people may have problems unique to their natural environments, political situations, and/or personal lives. While we may not find a direct translation for every problem and solution we encounter, we are advantaged by our ability to recognize more issues and how they might be resolved.
Increasing our exposure to problems, solutions, and diverse thought also helps us better understand that a search for smart people is wise to travel outside the classroom walls.
Expanding What it Means to be Smart
Sometimes, a singular focus on school isn’t the smart thing to do. While school smarts are typically touted as the defining metrics for finding great thinkers, people may have other priorities and/or preferences.
Schooling (especially public schooling) does a good job of providing access to general resources that may interest a wide audience. These systems test to fit general categories and push people to become more competitive in mainstream markets.
What if my time is better spent elsewhere?
Different Allocation of Resources Choices
We each have reasons for making the choices we do. Family values, perceived benefit, and social capital can all drive us to do certain things. It is important that we reflect on how diverse life can be so that we can better understand why someone might spend time differently than us.
If you grow up in a household that idolizes standardized testing, would it be a surprise if you placed a higher focus on preparation for these exams? Similarly, if your household faced an acute need for funding or resources, would it not make sense to devoting time to secure your financial stability?
We all want the perfect hand, but we best respond when we plan moves based on our current problems and preferences. An individual’s careful consideration of their situation to plan their time allocation will better indicate intelligence than any standardized test. For us to surround ourselves with more smart people, we must look at how people decided to do what they do and the results.
A passionate environmentalist is no less smart than an academic because they favored practical field research to devising course plans. An elite lifter’s passion for biomechanics may result in more time spent there than in Latin language studies. An individual’s unique package of skills and time allocations may provide a unique perspective on your own struggles, making it in your advantage to strike up a conversation and get learning.
Hyper Specialization
What happens if you devote all of your time to just a few things?
We have seen the young sports phenoms or heard about a music protégé competing with greats before they can legally drink a beer. A quote rings in my ears from Ted Lasso when Dani Rojas comes to the team and embodies “football is life” as a concept.
Hyper specialization results when either an individual or their parents/mentors recognize (or force) an intense skill or passion for a particular activity. Violin, chess, roman history, sports, or any subset of knowledge can generate hyper specialists. These specialists are excellent tools for learning more about an activity and pushing its boundaries. They can also help those who interact with them develop their own interests and passions.
It is important to recognize that hyper specialists are excellent resources for learning about a particular subject, but, unless you too are a specialist, will display skills or techniques that are unrealistic for the average enthusiast. If we only have so many hours in a day, why should we expect our diversified schedules to produce the same results as someone who has tirelessly focused with a singular passion on a specific activity?
Finding a Mentor
The digital era puts access to specialist training and information in everyone’s hands. We can watch professional calisthenics instructional videos on Youtube or take free Harvard courses from their website. Similarly, we can go to resources like The Spruce and find well-written advice on just about any home maintenance task.
Once we remove pretension from our determination of value, we become much more open to smart people and decisions that surround us. Finding a mentor does not need to constitute identifying a sage who will better us in all aspects of life (though, this would be nifty). Rather, we can find mentorship across countless resources, guides, and videos published by people interested in developing indingtheir passions.
Help Peers Succeed
If we want greater access to smart people in the present and future, we have to hold ourselves out as someone who helps their peers get better. Talented people are less likely to associate with those who take without giving. Additionally, if we do not work to help our future generations grow to be smart, thoughtful, and helpful, we stand in the way of our goal of having more good resources.
What is the point of existing as social beings if we do not strive to better life for those around us? If we develop specialized knowledge or experiences, why not share? Collaboration will only make it easier for us to refine our strategies and learn from those who might be able to lend a helping hand.
Conclusion
When we limit our information, we make it difficult to expand. New ideas, powerful personalities, and deviations from a rigid norm force us to question what it is we’re doing.
The digital age makes good information evermore accessible, meaning that it critical that we learn to review and assess various types of resources so that we can keep building our problem-solving repertoire. If we want to become a problem solver that others can relate to, we have to learn to accumulate information and lower the barriers to healthy conversation and debate. Who knows, that next chat over a cup of coffee (or online at Efficiently ELITE) might be just what it takes to get us going to where we seek to be.
Do you have any questions, comments, or critiques? Let me know!
-G
Footnotes:
- Have to give Slim Shady his credit ↩︎