2-3-4 Friday

‘Seeking to spark the most potential within you per word of any online newsletter’

This particular issue is about my struggles with being smarter than most. If you don’t like the smartest guy in your organisation, please don’t read on. If you want to understand his struggles, please read on.

1 thought

For a long time, I struggled to understand why I didn’t fit into organisations like charities.

I was terminated in the last job, issued a performance improvement plan in the first full-time job I had as a social worker, and went through the concerns procedure twice as a student social worker.

The concerns procedure is where your supervisor raises the possibility of you failing the placement because of concerns they have found with your practice.

Part of the past 3 years since leaving was reflecting on how much of it was a ‘me problem’ which I had to work on. Because we shouldn’t bring on those issues to other places of work.

You might also be frustrated at where you are at now. You know you’re capable of so much more, but you just feel stuck, and frankly, stymied at your efforts to grow at your job. You just don’t know why things feel so stuck.

You feel stuck.

You’ve gone for courses to improve yourself. Learnt how to better communicate. Gone for therapy sessions to figure out what the hell is the problem with you. You’ve had long and hard conversations with colleagues to ask them for their feedback on how to improve. But nothing works.

Nothing changes.

You sit in your cubicle, and you still see little moving. You’re fighting internal battles with colleagues to convince them about the great plan you have.

But nothing moves.

That sucks.

Really.

I can’t tell you how to change this feeling of 'stuckness' but I will tell you how it changed for me.

One evening, as I was griping about my job to my friend, he struck me by saying,

have you ever considered,

and I just want you to consider this,

even though this might sound a little crazy.

That you might just be more intelligent than the people there? I don’t mean that your colleagues are dumb. It’s just that you might be sharper at recognizing the problem, and more importantly, at coming up with working solutions.

Me? Smarter than others?

It took me a long time to accept that. Even though I had grown up in an ‘elite’ school, I had always been the dumbest of the lot.

I had done badly in the Alevels, but I never realized that was relative to the top 1% of Singapore’s population.

And when I struggled to fit into the army, I thought it was just me again. I saw how everyone was using their phone, playing games, discussing mutual (girl) friends on Instagram, and I wondered why that would be fun for anyone.

I ended up reading books on investment, leadership, and self development.

For a long time, I was angry about these guys who would ‘waste their lives playing computer games’. But the turning point for me came when I realised that they were different from me.

We were just built differently.

For them, these ways of consuming the time was fruitful and useful. There was nothing wrong with that. It was just that it wasn’t mine.

I preferred to figure out businesses, how they made money, understand concepts, and and reduce them to simpler, communicable ways.

Today, if you’re struggling to fit in, I would urge you to just consider,

Could you just be smarter, more intense, more intelligent than others?

1 talk

It’s not wrong to be smart.

It’s not wrong to be smart(er).

It’s wrong to think that you’ve to endure and fit in because of how others can’t understand you.

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Please don’t get me wrong again. I’m not saying that you’re better than others. It’s like how someone can cook, and you can’t. You wouldn’t go as far as to say that the person who can cook well is better than you.

It’s the same.

Your intelligence isn’t necessarily a trait that leaves you better off than the other.

It’s just what you make of it.

But the scary thing about intelligence, or over-intelligence, where you’re not just smart, but smarter, than the average person on the street, is that many of us find it difficult to fully accept it.

Because doing that will seem arrogant. Accepting your intelligence may make you seem snobbish.

Accepting your intelligence also means that you finally accept that you won’t fit in - and that’s very scary for most people.

Because there’s a huge price to pay. You finally realise that the people around you who talk about Netflix, their phone games, their homes and renovation, the bad jobs they have, would never be intellectually stimulating enough for you.

Most people end up subsisting on a base level, enduring what they are hearing, rather than going out and finding if there’s such a tribe of people who think alike, are pushed to think more conceptually about most things, and are willing to make the most of the intelligence they were given.

Being smarter than most, for a long time, wasn’t the best thing that happened to me. I struggled to fit in. I had few friends. I couldn’t keep jobs.

It was not until I realised that this intelligence was a difference, that I finally made the gift count.

John

Live Young, Live Well - Work Your Love

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