Our brains subconsciously love to size up people’s mental acuity based on several observations. It takes in the clothes, body language, words, and how a message is conveyed and puts them in a mental hierarchy. The vast majority of highly smart people are not only perfecting themselves, but also assessing the workings of those around them.
This is a list of five signs to determine brilliance. Of course, there are exceptions to the following points if you try to find them. These are just relative, an observation to make a nuanced take on the smartness of people, but not absolute. Because noticing nuances is also a good way to improve one's intelligence.
Smartness out of humility
During interviews and meetups, everyone tries to put their best face forward and try to sound smart, as perhaps they should. And these are not the kinds of places where we can differentiate smartness. Corporate working spaces tend to attract the face or the version of you that is useful to them. But we all have versions that go beyond just career-aspiring mindsets.
Our professor, before taking students to his class, used a trick: asking a question that the student doesn’t know the answer to, and observing how they respond to it. His selecting signs are not based on how correct the answers were, but more based on the admission of not knowing.
Instead of faking it or forcing a vague answer, a person should be able to admit their ignorance. Admission of "not knowing’ is a sign of humility. This is particularly true in a place where everyone is proving their academic smartness and internalises that ‘not knowing’ equals "failing."
Smart people challenge this mindset and instead remain honest about their lack of knowledge of a subject. They value the truth over ego. They don’t choose to say, "Maybe, it could be true," but rather go for "it’s definitely true." It's okay to not know everything, and accepting that fact makes you humble and smart.
The situational suitability
For example, people who refuse to be lazy and work hard tend to be smarter than the rest. People who read in their free time are smarter than those who don’t. Smart choices make people smarter than before.
When we were kids, I walked with my friend to a used sports equipment store. He was 10 years old and wanted to buy a cycle helmet. After looking at the price, he held the helmet up and asked to reduce the price. "Can you reduce a few bucks off? "I mean, it's got some dents and needs to be washed anyway." The seller gave him the discount and smiled, "You are a smart kid."
A study shows that street smart skills are just as important as academic smartness. Being crafty and demonstrating situational presence and quick thinking is correlated to actual smartness. To put it simply, you can be a mediocre academic student, but your ability to act spontaneously in response to a situation can propel you to success.
The not very obvious and underrated sign of smartness
When my roommate Laura and I once visited her family, she said she used to envy her sister as a kid.
They were both twins and were always together until college. While Laura found it hard to memorize for exams, her sister took less than 2 hours to study and also played video games while scoring the highest amongst the two. Her twin, being smarter than her, ticked Laura off to no end.
It took Laura several years to realize that they were two different people, and her sister was so addicted to video games that she struggled to move out of her house for college. She might’ve been doing good for the sake of beating scores in her gaming world, but unlike Laura, she couldn’t keep up with the idea of living while working hard for other reasons than games.
Laura, on the other hand, loved making art and spent her summer designing concepts and hired an engineer to create a video game for her sister as a birthday present. Laura is now a designer, and her sister is a computer engineer.
Laura grew up appreciating her unconventional way of being smart. She didn’t always get the best grades but accepted the world and its definition of smart without demeaning her identity.
Her love and kindness had more strength than jealousy for a person. That’s the kind of smartness the world needs more of.
They are objective and "so meta."
There’s this trendy phrase that everybody uses on the internet, "That’s so meta." It means self-referential. For example, a show that is behind the scenes of another main show is meta. A video game where you play a character playing a video game is meta. This is a famously smart way of appreciating the complexity of the world.
Smart people are meta versions of the human world. They talk and analyze themselves without being caught up in "self." They are objective in nature and make decisions and choices with a grasp of complexity, not just self-fulfilling. Like, "I eat based on ecological conscience and not on what's cheap and tasty because it affects my health." They hold values based on the greater good and leverage self-awareness to their advantage.
Here’s the strongest indicator of smartness
Our ancestors survived on the greater stakes of death than we do now. So did chimps and every other animal. But what makes Homo sapiens so special?
It’s their complex worldview. The pulsing core of great brilliance is the ability to simplify complex problems and solve them.
Smart people have a complex worldview. They do not settle for generic concepts and leave it at that. If a person says, "I became rich out of poverty," they are curious to know more about the specificity of the story. It’s an extension of curiosity. After all, generic sentences don't make us understand the world any better than what we already know.
There’s a lot of power for those who seek information more deeply. Even though we share 98.8% of our DNA with chimps, it’s our ability to patiently look into the details and complexity of nature that makes us the smartest, most unique species on the planet.
It sounds very meta, doesn't it!
Closing Thoughts
Society puts smart people on a pedestal. That’s a lot of pressure for both those who are deemed smart and also for those who lurk behind the shadows to prove their worth. Never forget that there’s no higher power than being kind to yourself. The rules which aren’t obligated to choose you aren’t rules to be followed at all.
Outside of repeated glorification of known "skills," I’m sure there are a million other ways of smartness we haven’t discovered or proved yet. There’s no real way to gauge a person’s intelligence. There’s no one-scan formula to determine the basis of smartness.
But if any of these five signs draws you close to appreciating yourself, there’s a good chance that you are quite smart.