Smart is overrated

I’ve met a lot of smart people. People who have great verbal dexterity. People who are fast processors of complicated information. People who simply know more than most and are unafraid to share their giant intellects requested or not.

Smart is a gift and if given the choice I would never trade appearance or possession for intelligence.  Very difficult to contribute in life without a good head on your shoulders and the ability to reason. 

But smart by itself is not a ticket to success.  Smart gives you the first 10 – 20 yards in the race. Smart makes it easier to overcome mistakes and to course correct when you can see that the desired outcome is lost.

But persistence trumps smart, trumps athletic, trumps imaginative.  Virtually nothing worth achieving is achieved at the beginning of a race. Don’t talk to me about 40 times. I’ve been behind most every race in my life.

But when I have sustained success it has been because I have refused to give in to my ego, refused to accept my quick thinking and instead buckled down for the long haul.

There are plenty of people who don’t like me. Most of those folks will acknowledge I’m bright. But what they rarely have understood is that I will stick in the game longer than most to accomplish what I set out to achieve. It’s not that I outsmart people. I wish I could and am sometimes given too much credit in that area.  The truth is that smart tends to cause us to take stupid shortcuts. Smart tends to work for fast short term outcomes instead of long term gratification.  Smart gets you to the dance. But persistence is what makes you the contest winner at the end of the night.

I love you boys both for a lot of reasons. No doubt your innate intelligence is part of why mom and I think you are so interesting to be around. I just implore you not to settle for being smarter than the average bear. Be smart with a purpose. Drive past your own intelligence and look for people who can challenge you to think differently.  And for Goodness sakes please embrace the fact that what you learned yesterday is something to be built upon or even discarded and rethought today and tomorrow.  Smart people … .and you both are … distrust their own intelligence. They continually push the intellectual envelope. They embrace finding out that they were wrong more than they revel in having been right.  Most of all, smart people go the distance. They persevere. They challenge their own comfort levels. And they don’t stepladder their intelligence over the backs of others simply to assuage their own ego.  

Thank God for your intelligence. Demonstrate it by not becoming self-satisfied, smug, or egotistical about what inherently was gifted to you by the lucky sperm pool.

A dad’s words. Love in a run-on sentence.

 

 

 

 

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