John Y’s Musings from the Middle: The Smartest People I Know

I’m not talking about highest IQ-smart, most knowledge, the most deeply insightful or profoundly creative.

I am talking about useful, practical, everyday smarts that arguably is the most important kind of smart we can seek to be.

Those people. Those are the ones I am talking about.

And their intelligence is hard to define, pigeonhole or quantify.

In many cases they aren’t even described by friends as “smart” and may not think of themselves as overly bright or well educated.

It is more than street smarts, too. Although that is a big part of it.

They are the people you go to when you have an important life or work or personal problem to solve and you need help.

Maybe the best test for these kind of people is this. You know when you hear someone say–even yourself— “Well, when you think about it that way, it does make sense?” I know I say that a lot.

My theory is that the kind of smart people I am trying to describe are the ones who we never hear say that. Because they are always thinking in “that way” –the seemingly odd and unconventional way about a problem that may make little logical sense but just seems to work.

Those are the smartest people I know.

And the advice I have received from them has meant everything to me. And they probably don’t even know it because I rarely tell them how smart their suggestion is. I usually just say, “Well, when you think about it that way it does make sense.”