Intelligence Doesn't Always Make Someone Smart

As a general rule, many people considerate formal education to be evidence of someone being smart. While excelling in school, and successfully completing the prerequisites necessary for advanced degrees generally indicates intelligence, at least in that specific field of endeavor, it often does not correlate directly with someone necessarily being smart. However, unfortunately, many people automatically defer to these exceptionally educated, well achieved individuals, assuming their proficiency, expertise and achievement in their particular field of study translates over to other areas as well. While in some cases, intelligent individuals are also smart, it is not necessarily the case.

It is also true that there are many extremely smart people who lack formal education. To me, smart people are those who demonstrate an intuitive nature, and are perceptive enough to fully understand various sides of issues, and to "cut through" the rhetoric, and appreciate the ramifications of taking actions, or refraining from taking any action.

Some of the most innovative individuals, who have significantly influenced and/ or shaped our lives, do not possess that high a formal education. When Microsoft Founder Bill Gates attended Harvard as a pre-law student, he left after two years, to take a job as a programmer. When he approached the sophisticated, well educated intellectuals at I.B.M. about purchasing his operating system for personal computers, they felt it was not in their best interests to do so, and rather "leased" his operating system. One can only imagine how the economic fortunes of both I.B.M. and Microsoft would have been drastically different, had I.B.M. made a different decision.

Years ago, one of my best and favorite investment and financial clients was a wonderful man, who lacked any type of formal education. However, he truly had incredible "street smarts," and his "gut" was a better decider than all the degrees available. Few individuals had an eye for investing like this man, and his specific view that he referred to as being a "contrarian," worked so well for him, that his business was a huge success, and his investment portfolio well out-performed most others.

For more than forty years, radio audiences have been listening to J.Donald Imus (known by most of us as Imus), and his news sidekick, Charles McCord. What many do not realize, is that neither Imus nor McCord have any type of formal education, yet appear to have both an intuition and an understanding of issues far beyond most of us, including the "intelligencia."

I would urge people not to judge how smart someone is simply by their degrees, or their incomes, or their success in a particular venture. One can be very well educated, make or have a lot of money, and have a successful business or occupation, without being particularly smart. I would rather listen to someone with common sense, true expertise (which is far different than a string of meaningless, unrelated experiences), and perception, than to someone who may be quite intelligent, yet lacks these important and essential qualities.