Episode 60. The Curse of Being Smart

 What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones, “The Curse of Being Smart.”

I've known a lot of smart people in my life. And I enjoy spending time with these people. They often have something interesting to say, but I've noticed that many of these hyper intelligent people in my life have kind of failed to meet the expectations that I had of them. I always thought these guys would be richer than me, or, or at the very least, have accomplished something meaningful.

Don't get me wrong, some of these guys do all right, but compared to what I thought they would accomplish in life, I've been a little surprised. I still think these people are very intelligent, but I think with intelligence comes a certain susceptibility to boredom and overconfidence. When a person knows they're smart, I think it's hard for them to believe that someone else is smarter, or at the very least, has figured something out that they haven't.

It isn't so much that they're too prideful to learn, it's that they simply don't believe other people could possibly know more than them. I. So, there's almost a kind of benefit that comes with doubting your own intelligence in that you take other people's advice seriously and are more likely to believe that someone else out there knows more than you do.

Overconfidence seems like the Achilles heel of the Smart People Club. It's really a quality that will leave you completely blind when someone that knows better than you come along and takes the opportunity you thought you had figured out. Smart people have some things figured out, but nobody has everything figured out. 

In a world with billions of people, there will always be someone smarter than you are, but even somebody that's not that smart, that simply knows something that the smart person doesn't know has an advantage over them. When you're too confident, it is the equivalent to driving blind. I talked with a guy that worked in private equity once 

And he told me a lot of these guys that sell their companies think they know better than the people they're selling to but end up doing far worse than they could have done all the while feeling like they were so clever. If overconfidence is the Achilles heel of smart people than boredom is a second Achilles heel on the other foot, the thing that shoots these smart people in the foot, so to say, is their insatiable appetite for stimulation.

It is possibly a bigger weakness than overconfidence. They often have this inability to stick to something long enough for it to bear any fruit. I've known many brilliant people with many brilliant ideas, but completely unable to accomplish any of them simply 'cause they lack the ability to do. Boring things in the world of tech, it's easy to think that big ideas and fast growth is the pathway to success, and maybe it is sometimes, but the vast majority of people, they get wealthy, do it from compounding effects of doing very boring things that people are willing to pay for and doing it for a very long time.

I can think of one smart person I know that's doing pretty well in life. But he partnered in his company with one of the most patient people I know. And from an outsider's point of view, the only reason that person is as successful as he is, is because he has a patient business partner. I want to see these friends of mine succeed.

It doesn't make me feel good to see them doing poorly. Too often they're just unwilling to play the long game.  The curse they live under is something akin to a hamster wheel that they put themselves on. It's like they can only stay focused on one project for six months or so before switching, or sometimes they stick at it, but they dedicate their energy to five different projects at a time and never invest deeply enough in one thing to see it through.

The path to my own limited successes has largely come from the simplest and most boring things to begin with. By no means is my company anything special, but we make an effort to make sure our clients like us. Really, my company's growth has been fueled by little more than trying to take care of the customer fast and making them feel like they're dealing with an actual person.

If you do that over a long enough time, it pays you back. There's an argument to be had that it's better for that smart person to scratch their intellectual itch than to force them to do things that are boring. And maybe that's true, but if they can stick it out just a little while longer, their ability to scratch that itch increases along with their resources.

A lot of people. We're trying to find their thing. I think there is a belief out there that if we just look long enough, we're going to find our thing that will satisfy our minds and allow us to thrive. But to many of us, everything is interesting to an extent, and once we know a good amount about something, we get bored again. 

You may find that your thing is to learn about everything. In which case it makes more sense to make it your hobby instead of expecting to become an expert at everything. If you take five cups and you fill each of them a quarter of the way and then you go back and repeat this until they're all the way full, you'll find that someone else that just filled each cup all the way to the top, we'll have gotten the job done sooner by far.

When I have to hire someone for my company. I've learned to look at how many jobs a person has had and for how long they've had them. In fact, it's probably the most important thing to me. If somebody has worked for 10 different companies over 10 years, how can you expect them to stick around for you?

The cost of losing an employee is substantial, especially when you factor in the time and investment that you put into that person. The cost to yourself from not sticking with something for a long time adds up as well. I recently interviewed a guy for a job that had had incredible experience in a different industry, but he decided it made sense for him to try and get out.

He had committed decades to that other industry, and his wages were fantastic, but the only job I could offer him couldn't come close to what his previous wages were. Now I understand his reasoning for trying to get out of that particular industry, but it was really remarkable to me how much of a hit he was going to take because of it. 

In the other industry, he had all the right relationships and all of the right experience, but they were ultimately useless to him when he switched. Boredom can be your friend. We fight it like it's our worst enemy. But boredom provides you the time when you can contemplate things when you're bored is usually when good ideas like to strike.

It's in those moments of nothing that you have an opportunity to let those ideas start rolling in. There are a lot of shiny things out there, but if you're too busy getting distracted by the next thing. You will never make progress with the first one. Maybe if you're really smart, you might have realized that it isn't just smart people that suffer from overconfidence in boredom.

The winner in life has never really been the smartest person in the world. It has always been the wisest. Be wise enough to be curious to find out what you don't know. Be wise enough to think ahead. Years, not days. Be wise enough to know where your nature wants to portray your best interest. I've watched good ideas rise and fall more than I can count, but the tortoise, in some instances truly does outpace the hare.

This is Skipping Stones - “The Curse of Being Smart.” You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit skippingstonessr.com and if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me at info@skippingstonessr.com.

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