My mother recently asked me a perplexing question as part of a joke I no longer remember the other day, and I thought to share it with you.
It goes: “Are you smart?”
It’s not a very complex question and it’s one that I’ve heard many many times over the course of time, but for some reason or another, when I heard it this time I processed it a bit differently.
The child’s standard response is to say “yes!” and then offer up any number of different things.
“I got 9A’s for SPM ma!” she goes and in the midway of life’s sliding scale it becomes, in somewhat chronological order:”I got into X college da! This many scholarships and people threw money at me qa!”
Over time though, I’ve come to realize that none of these responses really work.
I worked hard for sure, but I will always remember freezing up and writing incoherent paragraphs on my BM and Sejarah papers before I walked away with A+’s in both subjects yet only to momentarily ever forget how that happened – I will remember how I shamelessly sold myself and learned the good graces of social dynamics in group situations – I will always remember, partly from personal experience and partly from observations, that someone could go to a great college but then end up receiving a great measure of high idiocy built on paper tiger sense of false superiority as a reward.
If there is something that I got from these different experiences though, it’s definitely at least a sense that calling myself ‘smart’ on the basis of this constellation of documents and proofs is not something I can really accept, even if sociologically and societally speaking that is actually how it works, even if your personal estimation of your own abilities doesn’t match up with the observed reality; even if the world sees you one way and you see yourself another.
Naval Ravikant maintains a simple and singular idea of what it means to be smart: Are you getting what you want out of life?
It sounds intuitive and I agree with it, maybe because being ‘smart’ is always a contextual thing, in the sense that you are only ‘smart’ if what you do brings you more of what you want in life = but I feel that given the possible scope of what a person could want in life, that definition can be both too broad and too narrow at the same time, because do you want your time? Money? Happiness? You could pursue all of those things in a zeroing in of consciousness upon these Northern Stars, but what’s the solution to the puzzle that unlocks the constellation of your human wants at the end of the day really?
So yes, I like Naval’s insight, but to it I would add this:
A dumb person may *feel* that they’re smart, but feeling smart and being smart? There is a difference. I don’t have the irreverence to say that I stand amongst the smart ones, but I think it would be an insult to say that I’m dumb or to presume over the range of universes what you consider as smart or not smart, dear reader.
So I ask you a question in reply to the question I was asked, then.
Even if you thought that you were smart, would it matter?
