Personally, I’m an idiot. Everybody seems smart to me. Like other people have mentioned there are a lot of different ways of being smart though. I’ve known people who could do differential equations in their head. I’ve known people with masters degrees in physics. I know people who are able to observe things in the world around them others miss, connect data other people don’t consider connecting (like the author of Freakonomics). There are people with spectacular gifts in a particular area such as Mozart or Monet.
However, the smartest person I know, is a little chubby elderly woman named Christy. She doesn’t have a degree in anything. She is a messy clutter bug and I can barely get through her house. She doesn’t even know what a differential equation is, and will never astound you with a conversation about philosophy, chaos theory, or quantum mechanics.
What Christy knows, that astounds me, is people. She can read people almost instantly. She has an eerie ability to get inside other people’s heads. Whenever I visit her it is about my problems with other people. I don’t understand people. They baffle me. She understands people’s motives. She accurately predicts what they are going to do next and is almost always right. I go to her describing a situation, a person from work or a new boyfriend, and she nods as if she suddenly sees the light. “Ahhh. I know that type. He’s going to try to control you.” She’s always right!
Visiting Christy is like visiting the Oracle on the Matrix. She rarely leaves her little house so I feel like I’m visiting the guru on a hill. Still, she is so uncanny with her ability to understand other people, that I think she should be an FBI profiler or something.