How smart do we need to be?

My 9-year-old son Colter loves to make me feel stupid. All he has to do is ask, "Mommy, what's a rhombus?" and I'm reminded of my limitations.

Like me, Colter enjoys his intelligence. But lately I've been wondering whether being smart is as advantageous as we think.

When I was my son's age -- and later a teenager -- I too believed the '60s slogan "Knowledge is power." I accumulated as much of both as I could. I was book smart and street smart, determined to make my way in the world armed with information.

But it turns out that determination, more than my grades or test scores, may have been responsible for where I've gone and what I've done.

In a New Yorker essay about Ivy League admissions, writer Malcolm Gladwell described the relationship between initial inclinations, "getting in," and subsequent success. He writes, "For most students, the general rule seems to be that if you are a hardworking and intelligent person you'll end up doing well regardless of where you went to school."

So why am I still paying off student loans? Because finding a community where I belonged felt priceless to me.

I recently returned to that community, my alma mater -- Barnard College, where the median math SAT score is 660, the verbal is 690 and graduates include eight Pulitzer Prize winners. I found myself surrounded once again by smart, strong, sarcastic women making all kinds of choices. They have gray hair and purple hair. They live in cities and in deserts. They are cardiologists and mothers.

By any measure, they are successful. But how did they become so?

According to Gladwell's reporting, native intelligence isn't enough.

"Being a smart child isn't a particularly good predictor of success in later life," he wrote. " 'Non-intellective' factors -- like motivation and social skills -- probably matter more."

We all know people who are very nice or politically savvy and manage to do very well for themselves, even though they may not be as capable as we'd expect.

Part of the problem may be our definitions. When we say someone is smart, we mean many different things. We may mean that she is articulate or skilled. We may mean he is clever or well-read. We may mean all of those and well-rounded, too.

The idea that success may hinge on balancing multiple ways of knowing allows for creativity, intuition, emotional literacy and more.

It explains people who compete phenomenally well at board games (like Trivial Pursuit) but not so well in the boardroom. We fault them for that because we value intelligence as a status symbol, more interested in what it gets us -- an impeccable degree, an important title, an impressive income -- than what it gives us.

Are we creating monsters with multiple titles?

At what point can I put down The New Yorker and and watch "Grey's Anatomy" without feeling guilty?

There's no question that intelligence can sometimes be a disadvantage. As a young woman, I was too intense, too intimidating and too ambitious for myself and my peers, I imagine. I hadn't grown into my brain or my potential.

While I believed that knowledge was power, I also felt that ignorance was bliss. It seemed the smarter I was, the unhappier I became.

And then there was all the stuff I didn't know -- I switched schools at least a half-dozen times between third and eighth grades, leaving me with educational gaps in art history, musical theory and biology. These days, my husband helps our son with science and social studies homework, while I pay close attention.

But if intelligence is the ability to think clearly and critically, wisdom is knowing how much we have to learn.

Life tests us, but it doesn't quiz us. You can't cram for work. Or study the Cliffs Notes to parenthood.

We make mistakes. We succeed and we fail. We live and we love and we learn. In the end, we hope to wake up smarter today than yesterday.

And that's all I need to know.

A version of this LifeFiles column originally appeared on about 70 TV station websites managed by Internet Broadcasting Systems.

Comments

[Tia Oshields]

It's the skill of handling people which can bring a team to the top. Grades are just numbers which measure your intellectual capability. True intellect can only be measured by actual practice.

Off-topic...
@Kristi, care to share some things about the RVs from your husband's work place? How do they look? Are they awesome?

[Kristi]

My husband and I were just talking about this and he is the perfect example. Everyone in his family has advanced degrees (lawyers) except him. He went to a technical school to learn drafting. Right out of school he hired in to Fleetwood Motor Homes, quickly becoming a lead drafter then project manager where he stayed for 13 years. When I wanted to move back to Texas he took a job with Carter& Burgess, one of the largest Architectural and Engineering firms in the world. He had never done architectural work before but within one year he was a lead drafter for the CVS pharmacy program at C&B. Then, a year later he became project manager for their nation wide program pulling in over 6 figures a year. Not including bonuses. His education consists of 18 months of tech school but he is the 3rd highest employee in his program. He has no thirst for knowlege other than his field of employment and anything the kids are interested in. His work ethic is exceptional and like you pointed out, I believe that is why he gets ahead.

[elise]

A great post. Things I think about all the time so I can try to do the right thing raising my children. It's not something that I can talk about to people because I know it would sound stupid to say "I think my kids may be too smart for their own good". When you have 3 kids that get straight A's (and in my sons case straight A+'s on his last report card) you are supposed to be totally happy. I worry about their happiness and hope I am teaching them balance.
Again, great post.

[Julie]

I'm still suppressing memories of all the times I made an ass out of myself as a child by simultaneously betraying my intelligence and my ignorance - ignorance of the fact that most other kids had NO CLUE what I was talking about.

Lots of mixed messages, at home and at school, led me to lose my interest in academics in favor of pursuing popularity, and then all hell broke loose when I went punk rock. Interestingly enough, I never fully lost my vision of the future, so I kept up the academics (enough to make Bs and Cs in the AP courses) and the activities (enough to win "she tries harder than anyone else" awards in drill team). Let's not discuss college, okay? Suffice it to say, I have a BS and a MS. It wasn't pretty, but I made it.

I want to take a different approach with our girls. I want them to feel comfortable with their intellect (however intellectual they may turn out to be), but I also want them to feel comfortable around others (and for others to feel comfortable around them). It won't be easy, but hopefully I can take the lessons from my own childhood and adolescence and put them to good use.

And Malcolm Gladwell is a wonderful writer. Thanks for the link.

[Christina]

Welcome back! We missed you. I agree that how well you do has a great deal to do with your drive and determination. Social skills help, but are not necessarily the key. Look at Bill Gates - Asperger's, which means his social skills are definitely not those of Donald Trump, but without looking at the numbers, whose got the larger bank account.

Both were men driven by the need to succeed. (sorry that rhymed). Look at Temple Grandin - amazing people these are (god, I sound like Yoda). It's absolutely in the different ways of knowing and learning and utilizing what's been learned.

Great post!!!

[steve baker]

I think there's way too much talk about intelligence in our society. People even go on and on about how smart their dogs and cats are. It makes much more sense to assume that most dogs have an average canine intelligence, which in most measureable ways is far inferior to ours. And at the same time, we can assume that most people are pretty smart (at least compared to the dogs). Some are good at math, some at foreign languages, and some can look at the quivering muscles in a horse's legs and know that it's a good bet to win the race. The challenge is to find pursuits in life in which our special intelligence can shine.

[Lucinda]

I read the list of speakers at the Barnard event and was happily envious that you were among the participants. Erica Jong alone was enough to make me weak-kneed, but Anna Quindlen, Jhumpa Lahiri and Ann Brashares? Wow! It must have been awesome to be one of a group of women who are so talented in so many ways.

I agree that determination plays a tremendous role in one's success- determination and a little bit of luck as well. I tell anyone who asks me for career advice that nearly every success I've enjoyed has been preceded by at least 30 rejection letters.

And I love the idea of multiple ways of knowing. It provides for a much broader measure of intelligence, accounting for everyone from Stephen Hawking to my great grandmother, who left school at 13 but was consulted by her fellow townspeople on all kinds of matters because of her "wisdom."

Thanks for a thoughtful and well-written post!