Do You Think You’re Smart?
(Presented to the GSU Toastmasters Club in Baton Rouge, La. December 21, 2009)
Is there anyone in this room who knows or has known someone who thinks he’s really smart? Someone who looks down his nose at or easily becomes impatient with the people around him?
I suppose we all have, at one time or another. I get a kick out of such people because, it’s been my experience that believing yourself to be smart is the SUREST sign that you are NOT!
I work at a nuclear power plant where I assist new- hires in their training to become operators. Naturally, we hire bright young people with some type of engineering background.
Consequently, there is a likelihood of ego contests – a few will try to show that they’re smarter than the rest.
Since the success of the class depends on all of them getting along and working together, with each new class I conduct a short exercise that is intended to deflate any oversized egos.
(Draw or display the positive half of a number line)
What I have here is the positive half of a number line. It begins at zero and extends off into infinity. That is, forever.
This number line represents all the things that it is possible for a human being to know.
Now, let’s say that the average human knows 5 million things. Where on this number line will the mark representing 5 million be located? Well, considering that, compared to infinity, 5 million is next to nothing, I’d say the mark should be right down next to the zero!
Now, let’s say that we have a smart guy, and he knows 100 million things.
Where will the mark representing 100 million fall? Well, again, since we’re comparing it to infinity, the mark will be right down here next to the average guy’s.
The funny thing this is that this smart guy is looking back at us and thinking “HAH! I’m smart! I know lots, and they know little!” And we’re looking over his shoulder at all this thinking “This guy’s a dope! He actually thinks he knows a lot!”
Smart guys can be entertaining in other ways, too.
As a child I lived in a town in New Jersey that was right on the Delaware River. North of us was a real old drawbridge that spanned the river. This bridge had only a single, narrow lane for each direction of traffic. It was the type of draw bridge that opened by having its center span lift straight up.
Naturally, whenever the bridge had to be opened to allow a ship to pass, the bridge operator would turn on flashing lights and lower gates to stop traffic.
Well, this being a very old bridge, sometimes the gates and lights failed to work. In such cases, the operator would have to get out of his booth and wave traffic to a stop, and then go back inside and raise the bridge.
Well, on one very dark night, it became necessary to open the bridge. As fate would have it, the flashing lights and gates failed to work, so the operator came out and used a flashlight to halt traffic.
Some time after the bridge had been raised, a SMART guy came up one end of the bridge. Now, having been a smart guy myself, when I was much younger, I can imagine what this guy was thinking, when he came up to the line of stopped cars – “What’s everyone stopped for? The bridge isn’t open! There are no flashing lights! The gate isn’t down! What are these idiots doing? Stargazing? I don’t have time to wait for these fools! I have somewhere to be!”
And so he pulled into the other lane and hit the gas.
They found his car, and his body, about a mile downstream.
Now, this guy MAY have been smart to some extent. But if he was, I think he failed to appreciate just what being smart really means.
Now I’d like to tell you about someone who knew what it meant to be smart.
I’m sure you all recall learning about the Greek philosopher Socrates. Most people consider him to have been a pretty smart guy.
It may surprise you to know that HE didn’t think he was so smart! In fact, when he was on trial for his life, he made it quite clear that he never considered himself to be so.
Among the charges that were brought against him was one that accused him of presuming himself to be wiser than the elders, by virtue of the fact that he spent much of his time teaching the Athenian youth, even though he was not officially sanctioned to do so.
In his defense, Socrates related a story from his past.
He explained that a friend had informed him that the god Apollo had declared that no man in Athens was as wise as Socrates.
Socrates was surprised to know this, because he didn’t see himself as wise at all! But he couldn’t very well declare the god wrong or call him a liar.
So, he decided to seek out the person in Athens who had the highest reputation for knowledge and wisdom, in order to find someone who was wiser than himself. But when he interviewed this person, he came to the conclusion that, although the man was quite impressed with himself, his self-esteem was entirely unjustified.
And when he tried to explain to this man that he really wasn’t so great, but only thought he was, he incurred the resentment not only of the man, but of the man’s followers as well.
This prompted Socrates to seek out and interview other prominent citizens with impressive reputations. But when he interviewed each of them, he got the same results as he had with the first one!
From his experiences, Socrates concluded that, while it was all too likely that neither they nor he had any knowledge to boast of, they thought that they knew things which they did not, whereas he was quite conscious of his ignorance.
He said, “At any rate, it seems that I am wiser than they are to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.”
Ladies and gentlemen, to me, that’s the essence of being smart. A smart person is aware of his ignorance.
This is why we never see truly smart people strutting around acting as though they are better than everyone else.
Because people who are truly smart, know that they really aren’t!
This relates to one other idea that I’d like to share with you. One that you might remember the next time you see someone who thinks he’s smart.
And that is……….the less that a man knows, the easier it is for him to think he knows everything.