If You're the Smartest Person in the Room ...

Quiz time!

Are you smart enough to recognize the fatal flaw in the following advice?

"If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room."

It's a trick question ... there's not a single fatal flaw -- there are tons of them!

For instance ... what if the room is a bathroom?

And ... how do you ever have sex if the person you're hot for isn't exactly as smart as you?

I asked a bright thirteen-year-old I know what the problem with the sentence was, and he came up almost instantly with, "If you're the smartest person in the world, you're never going to be able to stay in a room. You'll have to spend all your time outside."

But it's worse than that. Once the smartest person realizes she has to stay out of all rooms, guess what? The second-smartest person in the world becomes the smartest person in any given room, so he has to stay outdoors as well.

Eventually, no one can be in any room, ever.

Many versions of this quote appear to be in circulation. Some say that if you're the smartest person in the room, you need to find a different room ... or invite some smarter people to join you in the room you're in. But why would the smarter people join you? That would make them the smartest people in the room, and then the advice says they should either leave or invite someone still smarter to join in.

More destructive still is the hidden elitism of the statement. It sounds like we're being advised to be humble, to seek out those who are smarter than ourselves so that we can get the best possible input into whatever we're attempting to do. But implicit in that idea is the certainty that someone who isn't as smart as you has little or nothing to offer -- that if you're the smartest person in the room, then the room is limited by the bounds of your intelligence.

Frankly, that's a load of crap.

For one thing, let's distinguish between smarts and intelligence. A high raw I.Q., properly educated, enables an individual to perform many tasks and calculations that are beyond the capabilities of lower-I.Q. individuals. But it's no guarantee whatsoever of good decision-making. Intelligent people are often trapped by the intellectual constructs they have absorbed, and may be at a complete loss in unfamiliar circumstances where those constructs don't apply. In contrast, a smart person has the ability to apply her intelligence fruitfully to a wide variety of situations and problems, because she has qualities of perception and understanding that the merely intelligent person does not necessarily possess.

If you're a really smart person, you ought to recognize relatively early in life that there's (a) always someone smarter than you, and (b) usually something to learn from everyone, even those who aren't your equals in pure I.Q.

Finally, the fact of the matter is, someone has to be the smartest person in the room. If that person happens to be you, and you happen to know of someone who might make a great contribution, you should invite that person regardless of how smart he is. But if circumstances call for quick action by the group of people on hand, then you need to accept the responsibility of being the smartest person in the room, and you need to use your smarts to help the group achieve the greatest possible synergy in addressing whatever task confronts it.

In other words, if you're the smartest person in the room, then hopefully you're smart enough to recognize whether the inhabitants of the room are up to the challenge that they face. At that point, you can make a sensible decision about whether it's worthwhile to pull someone else in, to find a different room of people, or to proceed forward with the team you have.

One thing's for sure: when you're the smartest person in the room, the last thing you should do is mindlessly jump up and say, "We're not up to this. We need someone smarter."