There is a pretty simple way to identify intelligence, if you’re curious. It’s a notion that goes back to Voltaire, who once wrote, “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”
Because if you maintain a curious disposition about the world as you get older, the more you start to grasp how little anyone knows about anything. And I don’t mean that in the dismissive way you hear sometimes. I mean it more like what F. Scott Fitzgerald meant when he said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
What I’m trying to say is that the more you know the more about the world the more you understand how much you don’t know. Someone who enters a room brash, sure of themselves, certain “this is the way world works,” is not an intelligent person. That is a confident person. It’s not bad to be confident. Quite the opposite, really. Being confident probably leads to more success than being intelligent, though the two can overlap as well. But being confident does not make you intelligent.
This story Codie Sanchez told about Warren Buffett is what I’m getting at. A successful friend she knew, a billionaire, had a dinner scheduled with Buffett. And the night before, this friend wrote 400 questions to ask Buffett—about investing, different financial sectors, life. But this man didn’t get the chance to ask Buffett any questions because he was too busy answering all the questions Buffett was asking him.
“All Buffett did the whole time,” the guy said, “was pick my brain on what I thought here, what I thought there, and I didn’t realize until I left that he had basically gotten all this information from me and I had gotten nothing from him.”
Later, after talking to a few others who’d met Buffett, the guy realized he wasn’t the only who this had happened to, and concluded: “The smartest, richest people I know ask the most questions and try to prove their intelligence the least. Because they know the ones who collect the most knowledge have the biggest unfair advantage.”
It was a similar lesson that Malcolm Gladwell learned from his father, a professional mathematician with no intellectual insecurity whatsoever. But more than anyone else he knew, Gladwell’s father was prone to asking “dumb” questions, stopping someone in the middle of a story, a sales pitch, or an idea, and saying, “I don’t understand. Can you explain that?” And then, in the middle of that explanation, Gladwell’s father would stop the person and again say, “I don’t understand, could you explain what that means too?” And he’d do this again and again, until finally, he did understand.
I’m pretty positive a key victory in life is not losing a childish level of curiosity. You know, asking, “Why? Why? Why?” over and over again. A good number of us likely stopped doing that at a certain point, told we’re being annoying, stop bothering so-so, be polite, be small. But an adult only says this, generally speaking, because the child’s nonstop “Why? Why? Why?” reveals a great and terrible truth to the adult—they don’t know everything! Mom and Dad don’t have all the answers!
But no one does. It’s liberating in a way, once you understand everyone is pretty much doing the best they can with the best they got. And it’s why you hear intelligent people are generally the ones most open to new ideas. Because as Tyler the Creator says, who we wrote about a couple weeks back, “everything is about reference point.” Never forget that Aristotle once argued that all objects in the universe had a “natural place” they craved and that’s why rocks when dropped from above fell to the Earth—it was because rocks “belonged” on the ground and naturally wanted to be there. And what’s crazier is that many smart people bought this premise until Isaac Newton bothered to ask why apples fell from the tree and popularized the concept of gravity.
We find this silly now but it’s only because we have the reference point of “gravity.” Can you even imagine not knowing gravity exists? But reference point is all about just understanding each other more as people. Tyler, for example, wondered why so many rappers pose like you see Jay-Z in this photo—“it looks goofy as hell,” Tyler said.
So he asked Jay-Z why one day. And it was because for someone like Jay growing up in the Marcy Projects of Brooklyn, drug dealers were the coolest and most successful people they knew. And a drug dealer would pose like that on the street corner to flash the wealth on their wrist—usually a watch, but maybe a chain—as a status symbol and to convey where they stood on the pecking order compared to other hustlers. So when a rapper like Jay got that same level of money, he posed like that, too. Reference point.
Intelligent people ask questions. Then listen. It’s really that simple. And perhaps the best explanation for why goes all the way back to the Stoic philosopher Zeno, who said, “We have two ears and one mouth” for a reason—“we should listen twice as much as we speak.”