It’s better to be smart than not smart, I suppose. But intelligence is still way overrated.
“He’s so smart.” “She’s very intelligent.”
Observations, perhaps, but meant to explain outperformance and convey expectations. Being smart is supposed to be the ticket to success. In a binary world, a world that demands the simplicity of an A or B choice, being smart is held up as the determinant of success. We all want our children to be smart, even more than we want them to be attractive or funny, kind or curious, even more than we want them to be happy. Not because we’re jerks. Because we think that if they are smart, they will be successful, and that their success will lead to their happiness.
Putting aside that there are many paths to happiness, and putting aside that assessing both intelligence and success are largely subjective exercises, being smart is nothing but one of several factors that affect outcomes. Even if we say success is excellence in a chosen area, intelligence alone is no guarantee that someone can achieve it.
Take me, for example. I am smart. Even very smart.
But I am not excellent in any field. In 30 years spent in the employ of different companies large and small I ascended to middle management. And I wasn’t held in high esteem in my later years, when I reached an age where my future potential was no longer as significant as the possible trajectories of others in my firm. I am an endurance athlete, but I’m not an elite performer. I have thrown pots for a dozen years or more, and I still have yet to create a single work that would be considered sublime. I don’t suck at any of those things. I’m just not excellent.
Being smart is almost certainly better than not being smart. But you need many other attributes to be excellent. Awareness. Determination. Curiosity. Organization. Focus. Commitment. Discipline. Prioritization. There aren’t many people who live at the intersection of all of those characteristics, so there aren’t many people who can be truly excellent. And as Malcolm Gladwell helpfully pointed out in his book Outliers, you also need luck.
Excellence is a complex brew, and we don’t do complexity very well. We want things to be simple. And obvious. And we’ve settled on intelligence as our proxy.
But we’re wrong. Not for the first time, and probably not for the last time either. But we are wrong.