Think Different
“Smarter is better.” It’s hard to imagine arguing with this premise. And yet, that’s not what the data suggest.
“In 1921 (Stanford professor and author of the first standardized IQ test, Lewis) Terman and his research team, through statewide testing in California, identified a group of 1,528 hightesting youngsters, whom newspapers called the ‘1,000 Gifted Children’ or the ‘little geniuses’ or, inevitably, the ‘Termites.’ Studied over the next eight decades, this group revealed a median IQ of 147, with some scores above 190. It included descendants of Benjamin Franklin, John and John Quincy Adams, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, P. T. Barnum, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain. It also included Terman's two children. The results of the study were in some ways underwhelming. ‘There wasn't a Nobel laureate,’ Terman's successor, Albert H. Hastorf, a former Stanford provost, reported. ‘There wasn't a Pulitzer Prize. We didn't have a Picasso. It's my guess that Terman was a little bit disappointed.’” (“Our Genius Problem,” The Atlantic)
The seemingly straightforward statement, that smarter is better, isn’t quite so straightforward after all. As Dr. Craig Wright, creator of Yale University’s popular “genius course,” puts it in The Hidden Habits of Genius, “the test failed to produce a single genius.”
What if we are looking in all the wrong places? What if we need a different set of tools, approaches, and ways of working, that aren’t so smart after all?
I fear that we’ve all been programmed to pursue “smart” tactics, when something dumb might actually do better. Einstein playing the violin when stuck. Maya Angelou keeping her workspace untidy. Khaneman and Tversky wasting time on walks. Joyce Carole Oates cresting the hill where her ideas live. Salvador Dalí slumbering with a key.
What we really need is permission to try the “dumb” stuff that real creative geniuses do. I can’t help but wonder how many more breakthroughs we’d experience if our toolkits expanded to include the stuff that actually works!
Related: Divergent Diversions
Related: Be Inefficient (inspired by Jerry Seinfeld)
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The fine folks over at Section recently interviewed me about some common mistakes I’m seeing folks make when they use AI. One of the biggest ones? The tendency to expect too little, and get just that.