I want you to look at Mark’s post in Comments from yesterday. You know what they say about how to look thin when you’re not? You hang out with fat people. Same thing goes with brains. If you want to look smart, hang out with stupid people. For example, you could hang out with me. People will think you’re a genius.
But it works the other way around too. You are a physicist and created one of my top-5 smartest/must-read comic strips of all time. Hang out with smart people if you want to know how ‘challenged’ you are. Now I know that my C-average in Algebra II was justified since it took me the whole test-time to solve that one problem.
I’m glad it doesn’t take on-paper math to put Leggos together with my grandson.
Also, like Arnold and Sid, I still haven’t figured out women.
Well I used to be smart. In grad school I set the curve on the comprehensive exam. But I’m getting dumber every day. Last year Frau G had me go to a psychologist because she thought I was losing it. Turns out I’m still in the top 5%. I must have been real, real smart when I was young because I feel really stupid these days. The worst thing is that words sometimes won’t come right away. I think that’s common when you get old. The psychologist also told me that a person couldn’t both be right brain dominate and left dominate. Well, he was wrong. Early on when I was learning to draw I could actually feel the switch from right lobe to left lobe. It’s really a neat feeling.
Similar aspects also apply to the hiring process. When I was working (retired now), my managers would tell me that they were generally reluctant to hire new direct-reports that appeared “smarter” than them. They were afraid that they would potentially make them look dumb.
For 45 years, I consistently followed the opposite approach–I ONLY hired people that I thought were smarter than me (sometimes a lot). I figured I could always hire a lot of people that were just as smart as me–I wanted to hire folks that would help make me look good. And it usually worked!
That’s good but unusual. I think that most employers are like parents. They want clones of themselves.