The risks of someone calling you smart and how to avoid them
joshuaspodek.com
joshuaspodek.com
In order to protect my image of being smart, I would avoid situations where I could make mistakes or appear less intelligent than I thought I was. And so I wouldn't try new things, and I would stay away from any activities that could "out" me as not actually being smart. Its really a vicious cycle, and the result was that I was far less productive & useful than I should have been.
Now I try to project an image of being hard-working instead. It frees me from having to constantly worry about messing up -- all that matters is that I get the job done. And I think I'm much better for it.
Have you not heard of it before?
Edit: Just realized SA has erected a paywall... That article used to be available in full, but apparently isn't anymore.
I agree with your post, that thinking encourages a lot of 'just stay in my small pond' behavior that's not really a good way to go through life
I've always wondered what my adult life would be like if a different perspective had been pushed on me as a child. Something different than 'you should be doing this at this level because you're so bright, you can do X without much effort even'. I'm hoping to not make the same mistake with my child.
This only happens if you adopt the deterministic mindset that one is born smart.Things get easier if you subscribe to the growth mentality that one can increase her intelligence if she works at it.
If you have good social skills, they'll be evident as soon as you are introduced to someone, no matter how you are initially described. Look that person in the eye & shake their hand (or do whatever culture dictates you do). That's more of an impression than what someone else says.
Even if the way you are described is what sticks out most, and your intelligence is stronger than your social skills or experience, that does not imply (and I really don't think most infer) that you have "negative" social skills. You could have "good" social skills (or experience) that is just outweighed by "excellent" intelligence, or even neutral social skills.
A sample comparison: When you say someone has a nice personality, is does not mean they're also ugly.
If, when asked "what did you think of that woman you saw last night?" your response is that she has a nice personality then yes, people will assume she is homely. If you were excited about her looks, your answer (it's assumed) would've been about how attractive she is. Maybe you meant to describe her personality irrespective of her looks, but that's not how people will interpret your message.
Communicating is about talking to people in a way that they understand you. So you could sit there cross-armed and insistent that you are not insinuating anything against her looks, as there is no logical interpretation of your statement which requires that conclusion. But, then, you would probably be the person this post is most for.
Also won't help you get a date. The reasons are not uncorrelated.
Beyond a certain level of intelligence (which varies depending on your industry--it can be very high in some fields) what helps you in business is empathy: being able to assess what someone wants and being able to use the analytical skills you do have to give them that.
Depends on the girl. Depends on you also. The label "Intelligent" as it applies to tech is slightly correlated with other traits like social awkwardness, spending 8 hours of your room locked in a room looking at fast moving flashing objects, inability to talk about anything else than those things. Be interesting. Highlight decorrelation. Acquire dates.
> what helps you in business is empathy: being able to assess what someone wants and being able to use the analytical skills you do have to give them that.
Oh for sure, this is true even in Academia. I was supposed to go do my PhD with a guy who was at the top of his field. Incredible mathematician/engineer. Guy was an asshole. My research advisor at that time told me straight out that he thought that would be a bad idea. Much later, I found out that every one of his students left one year after. So he spends most of his days studentless, publishing papers alone. This leads to lack of tenure: scaling of paper publishing requires additional resources.
The author's argument is that people in business don't value an IQ score in the abstract. But they do value qualities like "gets things done" which are often result of 1) figuring out someone's problem; and 2) applying intelligence to solve that problem. In dating, being "interesting" is often the result of 1) figuring out what makes someone tick; and 2) applying intelligence to impress that person on their own terms.
Because intelligence takes practice, and being interesting and social takes practice, and there are only so many hours in a day. There is a meme among some circles of nerds that goes like "while they were drinking and partying in high school and college, we were studying and acquiring skills". This is totally wrong-minded: the people partying were acquiring skills too.
The important point for the awkward and unsociable to remember is that those skills really are just skills, like any other; some people might be more or less "talented", but no matter what you are still going to need practice. If you spent your life exclusively acquiring abstract problem solving skills, perhaps it is time to step back, and round out your skill set.
That is not an excuse for anything though. No one has enough time. Everyone makes do. Heinlein's quote on what human beings should do is relevant here.
Well, yes and no. High cognitive ability is correlated with an ability to deconstruct the input-output responses of females.
However, it's also correlated with referring to "flirting with girls" by such absurd phrases as "deconstruct the input-output responses of females".
The trouble is that demonstrating social intelligence in real life requires a lot of dealing with ambiguity, situations where there is no one right answer, frustration, blurred lines, rejection, and other stuff that male geeks tend not to handle as well as the average male who doesn't overthink stuff as much.
I argue this is the nature of every hard problem. A math PhD involves dealing with ambiguity, broken proofs and rejection. Recalibrating yourself to become aware of social cues is not hard. It is also not simple. It is not a matter of not overthinking (As much as you choking in a tech interview is not a matter of overthinking).
People get frustrated when they are bad at something. The options are to get better or not. It is tempting to rationalize not practicing as being caused by something out of your control.
The tech world in general has some bias against what it takes to be a social person. See talks about meritocracy and engineers running the planet. There is definitely a lack of respect for the effort and ability it takes to actually deal with people, which is what most of life involves.
But when you consider startups like AirBnB, who at one time were selling politician-themed breakfast cereal, maybe it is the simple truth. Never give up; never fail.
> But when you consider startups like AirBnB, who at one time were selling politician-themed breakfast cereal, maybe it is the simple truth. Never give up; never fail.
This is magical thinking.
The brain is elastic; we are smart at what we practice, and it is good to sit down and practice your weaknesses as well as your strengths. Someone with really high level interpersonal skills is just as much a genius, they just practiced social gatherings and influence and such instead of, dunno, debugging linux configurations or learning set theory or whatever.
99% of anything you want to achieve in business or life you need to work through people to achieve, so people skills are just as important.
The reality is that in the real world you need other skills to succeed in business. The article linked resonates with my experiences in large, engineering dominated companies. Those who rise to the top do so not because of their technical skills but because of their ability to work with people. Those with poor social skills don't move up the hierarchy. Of course technical skills remain important even up the chain - a project manager needs to be able to understand what's happening below him - but there is far less need for the ability to solve complicated or abstract problems.
Success is measured in a lot of ways, and this is just applied to business. In other areas (perhaps academia, large companies which value techical work, open source projects) intelligence correlates more directly with success.
Edit: upon further reflection, I think the operative statement is 'rocket scientist'. I suspect that being introduced as a 'rocket scientist' is in fact a handicap because 'rocket science' has a connotation of being a kind of useless knowledge (i.e. what can you do with that). Other the other hand, think about how people react to someone being introduced as a 'computer genius'? Lots of people will find that very interesting because there are lots of practical and profitable things you can do if you're a 'computer genius'.
my unscientific response.
If people call you intelligent first, they are probably unable to say anything better about you. For that proposition I think we can ignore the few people who, by virtue of having ther genius manifested in the world already, do sometimes get called out for their intelligence.
Clients who think you are smart because you provided them an excellent service for less money than they think its value should be is good. I do data recovery jobs that work out like this.
Clients who think you are smart because you provide a solution that causes them to make a lot more money than they paid you is good. I do web design/promotion jobs that increase conversions which seem to fall into this category.
These are a completely different perception of smart than the kind generated from books I wrote or public speaking that I've done. This is my experience as an entrepreneur who may not be as smart as some people think YMMV.
Stereotyping, there is a group of people who are convinced they are intelligent and that it is important to be intelligent - those guys are usually not actually that good at abstract problem solving. Someone who truly is good at it tends to be more laid back about it, and wouldnt consider it a big deal or important.
I'm sorry, what? Neither science nor engineering is a solo endeavor. You still need to work with your colleagues if you want to succeed. Just think about it, how many science or engineering papers have you read which only had one author listed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influenc...
Also, when in a debate or argument with someone, focus on your end goal. Which is more important - winning the argument (or saving face) or getting your objective achieved?
Much better is to learn psychology, courses are available free on Coursera, Udacity and EDx.
You can spend your time doing a psychology course, but I'm not sure that would make you a more affable person.
Not saying that the reading materials and so on are bad, they are just useless without actual experimentation.
First, there's flattery. An investor or boss who puffs you up with "you're so smart" is often trying to create a context where you feel embarrassed by anything but a 120% effort. It works like a charm on the clueless, talented young people that VCs love.
Second, there's validation as a show of power. When someone says of you, "this guy is smart", what he might be saying is, "I have the power to validate or invalidate a person around here, and you're my guy-- if you keep in line."
Third, it can be a way of damning with faint praise. "He's smart" often means, "he has so much potential", which always comes with an implicit "but". It's much more effective to sabotage someone's reputation with continuing faint praise than to come out with an obvious attack, which just makes you (if you're the attacker) look like a bitter asshole. If you really want to ruin someone's reputation, you always make it look like you're defending that person (against negative social proof that comes "from the ether" because you just made it up). It's like spreading a rumor by denying something. "He clearly has issues with women but I doubt he's a rapist."
Then again, most of the time people are just saying what they think at face value and there aren't any hidden motivations. I wouldn't read too much into being called "smart". Often it means just that.
Still, it is a hard campaign to get out of the Smart Kid mentality (with all the risk-averse mediocrity and approval-seeking that entails) and get more toward a Maker mentality. It's taken me 30 years, and I still have to summon the courage to, e.g., put something in open source. Ultimately, though, every ex-"wunderkind" must learn that a Smart Kid is still just a kid. It's not something to make a career out of.