Thinking About: Being the Smartest Person in the Room

One of the bosses came up to me a little while ago at work and told me that I was the highest qualified person in our group of some 70 people. Apparently our educational ranking goes up to level 9 (I had no idea such a ranking even existed up till that point) and I was the only person to attain level 8 (twice actually). Of course what made the very idea even funnier to me is that my actual level ranking in the organisation is two up from the bottom and it goes a long way up!

Now of course this doesn’t mean that I’m the smartest person in our little group. Some of the people I work with are clearly smart cookies with years or decades of experience behind them. It’s just that a lot of what we do doesn’t really require the kinds of qualifications I’ve acquired. What’s more, attaining a certain level of qualification doesn’t necessarily make me smarter than people who haven’t attained and have no reason to attain it. As we all know things just don’t work that way. But it did get me thinking…..

Certainly for most of my school life I was probably one of, if not the, smartest person in my class. With some of the schools I went to this actually wasn’t that difficult. I’d always gone to state schools in basically working class areas so not that much was expected of us. Most people I grew up with lived up to that expectation. What did surprise me from time to time was that I seemed to be brighter than some of my teachers. I very quickly learnt that some of them really don’t like being corrected by what they probably assumed was a write-off educationally speaking. One or two really didn’t like it when I was right and they were wrong. Of course there were those who liked what they saw and encouraged me. A few teachers leant me books to get me thinking in wider areas beyond the basic curriculum. I still remember my English teacher lending me her own scholarship edition of Orwell’s 1984 when I was 11 or 12 so she obviously saw something going on between my ears! But no one likes a smart-ass (though I’d love to see a longitudinal demographic study on that broken down by gender and ethnic background) so I made sure that I didn’t put my health in danger by always putting my hand up first and always getting questions right. Being lazy helped though it finally screwed up my results when I took my exams at 16 and barely scrapped through. It was a bit of a shock to my teachers that I did so badly after they expected so much of me (finally). It was a bit of a shock to me too but not enough, apparently, as I screwed up my exams at 18 too and I didn’t even have a teen romance or two to blame it on.

For want of something else to do, with the economy in one of its periodic downturns, I went back to college and re-took some of my exams. Again things didn’t go exactly to plan and my results were not good enough for university. Back once more, again with high expectations from my tutors, I managed to scrape into university on the third attempt. Once there it became clear that I was no longer the smartest person in the room. What a relief that was! No longer having to hide behind indifference or ignorance was quite a breath of fresh air. Finally my peers were actually my peers! It was great to be in the company of people who could finally understand what I was talking about (mostly) and who could actually argue the toss with me without wanting to punch me because they thought they were being insulted somehow. Those years saw a much more confident personality emerge behind my eyes. Consequently I loved my time at university which showed in the fact that, after stumbling over my exams previously, I managed to get a 2.1 Honours degree without working nearly as hard as some people I knew in my year. Inevitably after that experience, now in the somewhat less stimulating workplace, I missed the intellectually challenging environment of university life.

So after a gap of far too many years I went back (twice) to do a couple of Masters Degrees. It was in the second that I met and was taught by some frighteningly smart people. I knew for a fact that in those two years I was far from the smartest person in the room – and found it greatly stimulating. Despite not having studied Philosophy to any great depth before-hand (one unit during my BA years and a handful of books since) I managed to hold my own in a group of people up to 30 years my junior and who had mostly graduated the previous academic year from a BA Philosophy degree. My essay scores where surprisingly impressive – related I think to the panic induced by not exactly being sure what I was doing coupled with a great deal of effort in their construction – and I know they raised a few eyebrows amongst my fellow students. My tutors seemed to be fairly impressed too, not only giving me generally high marks but recognition for good arguments and clarity of thought. Coming from people I recognised as head and shoulders above myself I definitely took that as a complement. In that kind of environment I had, indeed I had to, up my game and it felt as if my brain had dusted off unused or little used parts of itself to keep up with the intellectual challenge I had forced upon myself. Thankfully I had some very good tutors and a good bunch of fellow students to help me out and bounce ideas off. I definitely couldn’t have done it in a one-on-one situation. No longer being the smartest person in the room was again a liberating experience. It meant that I could relax, be myself and respond to the demands of the course work. I felt for the first time in quite some time fully awake. Some of the subjects stretched me a great deal. I struggled with Nietzsche for weeks before I got a handle on him and then for months more when I tried to work his ideas into my dissertation. But I don’t think I could have done that without the spur of not taking for granted that I was smatter than everyone else around me. I like being with smart people, I like it a lot and although I certainly wouldn’t like to be the dumbest person in the room I’m more than happy not being the smartest either. I’ll settle for being in the top 20%. That’ll do me fine.