Intelligence – what a fool believes . . . .

My Uncle Jim and I will never be mistaken for each other.

I am a college graduate with a double major in Economics & Management and English Composition and a year of graduate business school under my belt. He dropped out of high school. I have lived in Canada and Chile and several of our United States, and I have traveled in South America, Europe, Asia, and New Zealand. If Uncle Jim has spent any time at all outside a 100-mile radius of Rockton, Illinois, I would be shocked. I have worked in Fortune 500 companies and start-ups, most recently launching a franchise shared-workspace business. When he worked for someone other than a neighboring farmer, Uncle Jim drove a local delivery truck.

I don’t say this either to demean this most generous man or to extoll any talents of mine. These are facts, easily provable even in this charged political environment that doesn’t seem to recognize them.

I say all this because I was having a discussion with my brother on a drive back from southern California yesterday, and we landed on the word “smart.” He said he didn’t think he was as smart as our sister (kindly, he made no comment on how he thinks she and I compare!).

I’ve thought for some time that “smart” is a uselessly imprecise term, and I feel more strongly about that with every passing year. And when a man as talented as my brother feels like he is lacking, I know why I feel that way. “Smart” is such a nebulous concept with so many variables that it cannot be commonly defined. To wit:

If you wanted someone to build a business performance model, relating processes to each other, and associating costs and revenues to products and services, then you would be far better served to hire me to do that if your only other choice was Uncle Jim. I don’t think he’d be able to even comprehend what you wanted when you started to describe it. When it comes to creating a quantified reflection of what a business does, I am much smarter than my uncle, which is to say I understand the concepts, I know how to dissect a business, I’ve mastered the technology that allows me to build a pretty sophisticated model that can accommodate many scenarios, and I can communicate my findings.

Getting a truck or a tractor to run is a completely different situation however. I don’t know how an engine works, or how that engine transfers power to move not just the vehicle but also any equipment that it uses, or what that equipment even does. But Uncle Jim sure knows. Anything you find on a farm, he knows how to get it to work, and then he knows what to do with it once it’s going. When it comes to machines or farming, Uncle Jim is way, way smarter than me.

So when it comes to being “smart,” I think any assessment has to be contextual. There is just too much difference between people and their capabilities, knowledge and experiences – to say nothing of how all of that applies to the question at hand – to be able to declare definitively who is truly smart.

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.