What Does It Really Mean To Be Smart?
Its My Opinion, Am I wrong?
Have you ever thought about what it is to be intelligent? Probably some of you have, right? Because you meet your friend and he’s pretty dumb and maybe you think you’re smarter and you wonder what the difference is.
And I’ve thought about this a little bit myself and one of the things is it seems to me a lot of it’s memory, but a lot of it’s the ability to sort of zoom out like you’re in a city and you could look at the whole thing from about the 80th floor down at the city and while other people are trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B reading these stupid little maps, you can just see it all out in front of you.
You can see the whole thing. You can make connections that just seem obvious because you can see the whole thing. But the key thing is that if you’re going to make connections which are innovative, you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does or else you’re going to make the same connections and then you won’t be innovative. So get different experiences than the normal course of events. And one of the funny things about being bright is everyone puts you on this path, you know, to go to high school, go to college.
I’ve heard about some kid that’s 14 on his way to Stanford, and that’s great. That’s sort of out of the ordinary. But you might want to think about going to Paris and being a poet for a few years, you know, or you might want to go to a third world country. I’d highly advise that. You know, fall in love with two people at once. Walt Disney took LSD, do you know that? And that’s where the idea for Fantasia came from. And you can go hear stories about all these people, and the key thing that comes through is that they had a variety of experiences which they could draw upon in order to try to solve a problem or attack a particular dilemma in a kind of unique way. And so one of the things that you’ll get a lot of pressure to do is to go in one very clear direction.
And one of the things that I had… In my mind growing up, I don’t know how it got there, but the world was sort of something that happened just outside your peepers.
And you didn’t really try to change it, you just sort of tried to find your place in it and have the best life you could. And it would all just go on out there and there were some pretty bright people running it. And as you start to interact with some of these people, you find they’re not a lot different than you. The people actually making these decisions every day that are sort of running the world are not really very much different than you. And they might have a little more judgment in some areas, but basically they’re the same. And once you realize that, you start to feel you have a responsibility to do something about it because the world’s in pretty bad shape right now.
And I guess one of the things that motivates a lot of people that I’ve seen that actually get out and do something in any different field is that we all sort of eat food that other people cook and wear clothing that other people make. and speak a language that other people evolved and use someone else’s mathematics. And we’re sort of taking from this giant pool constantly.
And the most ecstatic thing in the whole world is actually put something back into that pool. And I think people from all the fields would express the same sort of feeling. It’s the most ecstatic thing that I’ve encountered. So I would highly recommend it.
