For the purpose of this substack I will split people into two camps: Smart and Dumb (or un-smart or not smart). I think this works because people who progress up the IQ ladder tend to think this way.
Smart people tend to get more and more isolated as their intelligence level increases. The smarter tend to look at anyone not as smart as them as, well, dumb. It gets lonelier and lonelier at the top.
Being smart is no guarantee of success—in relationships, business, and communication.
In fact, those of us who are dumb can do just fine. We communicate well, have strong relationships, solve problem, get projects done and build businesses. We enjoy lots of success and have large circles of people and influence. Why is that?
The answer could be in the fact that smart people have several observable and obvious flaws.
Over the last several Covid years, these flaws became obvious in a big way across the West. But I have noticed them for decades in business, too. Smart people have flaws.
Here are some of them.
They think they can’t be fooled
One of the most obvious flaws that smart people have is that they believe they cannot be fooled.
We saw this during the Covid scamdemic. The flashing red lights were not visible by the credentialed class. They could only see the experts in front of them and leaned heavily on credentials and consensus.
“What. You think EVERYONE is wrong and you are right?” I heard this multiple times.
Doctors were probably the biggest disappointment. It was as if their journey through medical school gave them some kind of belief in their earned superpower magic that trumped basic observation and skepticism.
The doctors around me strutted around as if these pandemic times were made for people like them. When given access to basic observations or data that refuted their consensus narratives, they usually acted in a dismissive and condescending way.
I even had a doctor friend tell me, “Well, I went to medical school, so…”
Smart people develop an armor built by years of affirmations. Grades, test scores, relatives, credentials. By the time they leave academia they have suffered very few setbacks and tend to be blind to their weaknesses.
They certainly don’t think they could ever be fooled…
They are sore losers and bad at competition
Smart people are usually very competitive. But they suck at it.
I used to bring my top smart people with me as subject matter experts on sales calls. If our client brought their own smart person to the meeting, I knew exactly what would happen: the joust.
It literally happened 100% of the time. One smart dude would try to demonstrate their intelligence and the other smart dude would get on his horse and joust.
What was hilarious about the meetings is that the “dumb” people in the room all saw what was happening and would manage the game. The smart people had no idea that they were only jousting as long as the dumb people were allowing them to.
And then, when proven wrong or unable to convince their opponent, the smart person typically would be dismissive. Their opponent was not smart or was simply being clever in obfuscating the real data.
They believe that if they can’t convince someone it is the other person’s problem
Smart people are often terrible at winning people over. There is a blatant level of condescension that they hold toward people, especially those that they can’t convince of something.
I can’t tell you how many times I have been around a smart person who outright dismisses another person, or an entire department of people, because they “didn’t listen” or failed to adopt a recommendation.
The smart person has little to no appreciation of the challenge inherent in dealing with people, personalities, or personas. And when partnered with people who DO appreciate the complexity of “the human” during problem solving, they generally dismiss the target humans as idiots.
They believe that with increased intelligence comes increased authority
This is an age-old problem that has plagued civilization since…forever. The smart tend to rise to “elite” status, especially in the academic institutions. And, soon they push their morality and virtue priorities down to their students and out to their friends in politics, business and media.
In fact, it is sometimes difficult for the “un-smart” class to consider their role in defining what is moral or virtuous. For most of my life, it has been the elite who tell us what we should believe.
This was a riot (get it?) to see during the summer of George Floyd. Oh how the smart people shared their virtue. With authority. But worse, they felt like they, alone, were credible enough to establish what was morally right.
But it is more than just morality and virtue. In business I would occasionally have smart division-heads make corporate-wide decisions that they had no business making. Now, this is not just a problem with smart people. However, when smart people are called to the carpet they rarely have any remorse.
They made the right decision. You are an idiot.
They are convinced that their failure is someone else’s problem
Smart people rarely take ownership of their failures. Worse, they don’t appreciate that failure in any part of a system will mean that the system fails.
One common statement I heard during my technology days was, “If people were not involved, this solution would work perfectly well.” Of course, it was worth reminding them that the solutions we were building were FOR people and those people were PAYING us to build them.
Recently public health officials have started to notice that their obsession with a narrow band of metrics during Lockdowns had devastating effects on mental health, education and the economy.
Dumb people knew that a long time ago.
The typical structure of large projects (IT, Engineering, etc) exacerbates this issue as roles are usually divided up into specialities. This allows for roles to blame other roles when a project is not coming together.
It is not surprising to find project managers who are less smart running these projects. Some of my best project managers were less “smart” but were good at faking it. This allowed them to get in good with the smart people but do something that smart people often fail to do: take ownership of the entire project, address problem areas and get the entire thing across the finish line.
They are easily flattered
I don’t doubt that smart people are no different than dumb people in that both have insecurities. I can only imagine that being “smart” was not always an asset to the smart person. Everyone has their dark days.
Smart people hide their insecurities fairly well. By the time I encountered them in business, their smarts had become an asset and they generally had tremendous outward confidence. But their insecurities (maybe from when they were called a nerd or were picked last in gym or struggling to keep up with the other smart people) made them forever susceptible to flattery.
I generally made it a point to say out loud in my meetings with smart people that I was not as smart as them. I generally did this as a way to disarm the other dumb people in the room. But the smart people generally sat up in their chairs and proceeded to speak with more confidence and authority.
One time, in an interview with a leadership hire, I sensed some “smart person” overconfidence so I decided to see how absurd I could be with my flattery. I literally said, “We have no idea what we are doing with this company and have stumbled into our success. I bet you learned a lot at Stanford about running a business.” The interviewee took the bait and proceeded to tell me what I needed to do with our company1.
I sat there in amazement before ending the interview early.
The critical thinking gap
One of the biggest issues that smart people have is that they are profound problem solvers but usually terrible at critical thinking. This may sound ridiculous, but bear with me.
I should probably define terms. In my world, problem solving is figuring out the correct answer. Solving the proof. Determining if the final outcome is a one or a zero—if the light switch is on or off. Smart people are really good at this.
Critical thinking, to me, is determining what shade of grey should be favored when the answer cannot be known.
Smart people, I have found, do not see the nuance between the two and, therefore, tend to think in terms of absolutes. They believe there is an answer and that they have it.
The critical thinkers, who are often not “smart,” usually appreciate that there is no “answer,” and that we have to make a decision. Furthermore, because they understand that there is no true answer, they tend to make a better decision than the smart person.
They devalue non-smart attributes
Most people in business have built powerpoint presentations for the purpose of winning a sale or improving a client relationship. Smart people tend to struggle with this process and generally over-value their contributions while under-valuing others in the room.
If a presentation is put together only by smart people, it will likely be 100% accurate and 0% effective. You need the dumb people in the room to say, “I don’t understand that graph.” or “What does that mean.” and, most importantly, “That’s not what our client wants.”
The skills of a sales person who reads the room better is often lost on the smart person. So is the design savant who appreciates how people absorb information. Even the CEO who often is good at efficiency is disregarded by the smart person.
If things go properly, the smart person’s precious graphs and bullets will be minimized and the 15 page deck will be downsized to 5 pages. The smart person generally feels slighted and, when the sale is successful, assume that the client is retarded.
They are bound by rules
Similar to the critical thinking gap, smart people often times get bound by the rules of the game. Dumb people often learn to solve problems outside of the rules. So, too, do the true critical thinkers.
Critical thinkers tend to assume that the answer is a shade of grey. So when bound by a black or white they tend to not only doubt the answer but also challenge the rules of the game. Break the game and you break the binary answer.
I had a sales guy once who had gotten so fed up with the back and forth edits to a contract that he sent his “final” version to the other party and made it clear that he was done negotiating and didn’t want to hear back. But what made his “final” version of the contract unique is that it was the original contract—no edits. The sales person decided that the cordial back-and-forth was not paying off so he tried something different. The other party freaked out after sensing that all the negotiations had fallen apart. They quickly agreed to the most recent edits.
(I had never seen this tactic before and we proceeded to use it again in the future with success.)
Some of our best solutions came from our dumb sales people. They refused to be bound by the rules of the game.
Having the smart people joined by dumb people in meetings usually resulted in better ideas and outcomes because dumb people will color outside the lines.
In conclusion
It is the rare smart person who doesn’t suffer from some, if not all, of these smart-people curses. Most dismiss critiques, especially coming from dumb people, or think “I don’t suffer from this flaw. I am smarter than that.”
Understanding the weaknesses that smart people have should be an encouragement for those who are not “smart.” You should feel confident that you likely bring something to the party that smart people need. I mean how many times have you appreciated the dumb person on Twitter who articulated something that credentialed scientists struggle to explain? Credit needs to go to all the dumb people who acted as translators for the smart people during Covid.
The fact is, dumb people often drive the success in relationships and businesses. They read the room. They build alliances. They deliver messages. They are creative and courageous. They get us through crises. Don’t underestimate the importance of partnering dumb people with smart people to advance an agenda.
I love being a part of teams of smart and dumb people in business. And I loved seeing the dumb people rise up during the Covid mess. While the smart people promoted tyranny upon tyranny, it was the dumb people partnering with their own smart people who organized the resistance, translated data, and won people over.
Smart people often have a hard time understanding why the smart person in this story failed so badly. There are many reasons, but here are three: 1. In sales you typically don’t tell a client that their baby is ugly. Good sales people know that relationships and trust are both hard to develop and quick to dismantle. So a savvy sales person would not agree to the premise that “we don’t know what we are doing.” 2. Street smart people understand the idea of context. One of the brightest people I know never graduated high school. But today if I had a critical project that needed a great team I would hire him in an instant—because he learned in the school of hard knocks that there are no easy answers and that context is king. Well, the smart Stanford dude didn’t realize that my premise/question was a trap. The ONLY way he could help me better my business was to first understand the problem and then try to understand, as best as possible, the CONTEXT from which the problem(s) arose. 3. Our business was very successful. The smart person should have stopped, looked around, and reversed the flattery, “Ha. You must know SOMETHING because you have a very successful business here.”
Dunning Kruger Effect.
I am guilty of falling into it at times.
Good article thanks.
This dummy wannabe salutes you and your insights here! I'm going to make explicit something I think is implicit in your comments. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I think its really a comparison between those operating out of a healthy humility who therefore don't assume they know the most ("dumb") and those fueled by arrogance into perpetual or episodic blindness because they assume they know the most or all there is to know ("smart").