Anti-smart | Seth’s Blog

There’s a difference between intellectual and smart. A plumber is smart, they know how to do a skilled and effective job on the task at hand. Intellectualism isn’t about practical results, it’s a passion for exploring what others have said, though this approach is sometimes misused to make others feel uninformed or to stall.

If you want to know what the scholars have written, ask an intellectual.

And if you’ve got a problem worth solving, it might pay to ask a smart person.

And yet, if the GPS is broken and we need directions, sometimes we hesitate to ask a local. And if your computer isn’t working, swearing at it might be less effective than asking an IT pro.

There are a couple of reasons we might resist help from someone who is smart:

–It exposes us to change and all the emotions that come from that. If we insulate ourselves from useful insight, we can stay put, stuck, with no changes required.

–It can make us seem dumb in comparison. It might be better to live with the problem than be seen as someone who didn’t know about it.

Access to smart is easier than ever before. But we need to seek it out.