Sexy Smart OR Smarty Pants?

First of all you’re probably wondering: “What the heck does it mean to be too smart for your own good?”

You can have many types of intelligence.

Book smarts. Street smarts. A genius with music. A genius with locating discount grocery store coupons.

Whatever.

This topic is how being a smarty-pants plays out in your social life.

There is a few main areas I have personally noticed over the years.

Let us run them through.

THINKING WHILE OTHER PEOPLE TALK:

Right off the bat, if you are the kind of person who creates a lot of value by THINKING, then it is probably going to be hard to locate the off-switch.

Learning is an addiction.

Once your brain has been forced into a gear where it is learning all the time it goes from being tiring and annoying to enlivening and awesome.

You start to see the bigger picture and realize all the potential.

Over the years you become a fiend for more knowledge.

The same goes for analysing information into useable, practical bite-sized chunks.

Analysis is an addiction. So you think and think, and then think and think some more.

The problem is that while other people are talking, what are you doing?

THINKING.

After all, if you are thinking in terms of big picture concepts, then you are probably holding up all sorts of images in your head and trying to weave them together into something coherent.

Ironically, it is often when you relax for a minute (while listening) that the jumble of information starts to congele into some sort of epiphany.

So you’re listening to somebody and –C-L-I-C-K- you have a realization.

“Wait a sec man…Wait a sec…Did you realize blah blah blah blah blah blah blah…”

The problem here is that it is always about YOU.

You are interrupting the other person and they do not feel like you are listening to them.

The solution to this one is to make a firm life commitment to “let some of them go” in terms of your ideas.

This was actually a point made to me about five years ago by a buddy of mine.

He told me point blank “Dude you HAVE to decide what’s more important to you. Vocalizing every idea or having people think you’re a cool guy. It’s up to you.”

I said to him “Yeah but my attention span is short. If I don’t get it out I’ll lose it.”

Again he said “It’s up to you man. It’s one or the other. Do what you want but it’s up to you.”

This hit me hard and I never forgot it. From then on whenever anyone spoke I made the choice to listen to them one hundred percent.

The bottom line is that when another person is talking, you have to allow your awareness to be on THEM as opposed to your own train of thought.

If you have a realization while they are talking, you have to accept that you might lose it.

“I might forget this and NEVER get it back. That’s fine. The world will be OK.”

TELLING PEOPLE THAT YOU HAVE ALREADY THOUGHT OF THEIR IDEAS:

Next is probably one of the biggest ways that “smart folk” successfully alienate themselves from untold legions of people.

That is that in all likelihood, you have already thought of almost every idea that the majority of people have ever had.

Now of course, that does not mean that you have nothing to learn from people.

It is just that the average person who is trapped in the day-to-day grind of running the rat race and keeping up with the Jones’ probably has not had a lot of “free time” to consider their ideas under a microscope.

They are either too busy or too indifferent. They have other priorities.

The result is that when they share with you an idea they are really proud of, you have probably already thought of it, analyzed it, and weighed out the pros and cons.

The problem with this is that there is nothing more obnoxious than when somebody shares an idea and you say: “Oh yeah I already thought of that. Have you considered blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah…”

The issue is that you might think you are helping the other person but they will almost always dislike you for it.

And with good reason.

Most likely they were NOT asking you for your advice. They were just socializing and wanted to get excited about something with you.

Or maybe, just maybe, they want to make their own mistakes? Ever thought of that one, SMART GUY??

Instead you have got to learn the art of saying: “Oh cool man…That sounds awesome.”

This allows people to feel good about themselves, and even cooler, you come across as intelligent automatically because most people care more about being understood than receiving critical feedback.

Obviously there are cases where people want real feedback, and that is a matter of common sense.

But you already knew that.

Truth be told you REALLY CAN learn something from everybody. Even people who appear not to be “with it” entirely.

It might not be “analytical” but it can be very practical, and a lot deeper than you would ever expect.

In my opinion, it is the people who realize that they can learn from every single person they meet who are the most intelligent.

GIVING ADVICE TO PEOPLE WHO ARE ALREADY HAPPY WITH WHERE THEY ARE AT:

Over the years, I would say that the dumbest, most useless thing I have ever done is offer advice to people who are perfectly happy with where they are at.

The key to understand here is that the smarter you are, the more likely you are to be dissatisfied.

Why?

Because you know what your potential is.

You know full well how to make an outstanding life, exactly what it would look like, and the steps involved in building it.

But most people are happy with easier, simpler lives. They appreciate the little things.

It might sound belittling but it is not.

Being a globetrotter and having traveled extensively, I can say for sure that many people who appreciate the little things have a very DIFFERENT KIND OF INTELLIGENCE than the so called “intelligentsia”.

They have learned to love life passionately and gain happiness from the fun they share with people around them. Or maybe from playing soccer or a musical instrument. It does not matter.

That does not mean that you cannot have both an outstanding life and an appreciation for the little things, but many people simply do not need that.

(And trying to convince otherwise them is no different than an advertiser who tries to make you feel incomplete for not owning their product).

Up until about two years ago I would give advice to anyone who I thought could benefit.

Then I started restricting who I would offer advice to, and even actively changing the topic when people asked for it.

From there, I picked up the extra slack by “brain-dumping” the people who I care about the most — because I always wanted them up to speed with all the cool stuff I had figured out.

However, I have since realized, funny enough as recently as this week, that that is not a good way of relating to them, and in fact it is even MORE important not to bombard people who are close to me with advice.

It might come from a super positive intention, but it is not serving the greater good of the relationship.

In fact this rabbit hole also goes deeper than you might have realized.

When you offer too much advice to people you are close with, they may stop taking care of themselves.

They will begrudgingly accept your role as the “dad” while simultaneously being somewhat annoyed in circumstances where you have not taken care of everything.

You have to let people make their own mistakes.

Chances are that YOU gained your best knowledge through various screw-ups, and you have to give people the gift of making these screw-ups for themselves.

This year, I have made a firm resolution to offer advice to people only within two contexts.

First is if they make an appointment to ask for it, and second if I am being paid within a professional context (coaching, events, etc).

Make sense?

JUDGING PEOPLE BY YOUR OWN STANDARDS INSTEAD OF LETTING THEM LIVE THEIR LIVES:

The “worth” of a person is not defined by their level of actualization, because that is every person’s personal preference. You might judge an individual negatively for it, but really you are just judging yourself.

And you do not have to.

Just because you do not judge somebody else does not mean you give up your own personal standards.

It actually means that you are smart enough to distinguish the needs of other people from your own.

Work/Play: Distinction And Synergy

In marketing there is a principle which states that: “Most people, by the time they become adults, will lose their capacity for youthful abandonment. They will never lose the CRAVING for it but they become psychologically starved because they no longer have the ability.”

This is pretty fascinating when you consider all the advertising with images of adults with big beaming smiles on their faces while using the product – but when you think about it, how many adults do YOU know who have the ability to have that much fun?

By my own personal estimation, fun is probably one of the least commonly experienced emotions among adults.

When an adult says: “I’m having fun”, it is more often a vacuous jargon that means “I’m interested in what I’m doing” as opposed to the ecstatic abandonment they enjoyed when they were kids.

Of course, most folks would never admit it to themselves because fun is thought of as being the light at the end of the tunnel for achieving success.

You get to have fun during your leisure time, so if you want to have more fun, simply become successful so you can take time off. Right?

This is basically thought of as being a truism.

Probably because it WAS true at one point, but as you get older you do not realize your neurology has changed. (We are using the word “neurology” pretty loosely in this article -– but you catch my drift).

The way it works is basically like this.

Your neurology adapts to whatever circumstances you are most accustomed to.

So if you are a little kid who is used to playing around all day, you are probably going to feel antsy and restless when you are asked to focus on school.

And if you are an adult who slaves furiously to meet deadlines for years on end, you are probably going to feel trapped in your head when you are out trying to have fun.

This has been a topic on my mind for the past several years.

Around 2006, I noticed my personality had changed, both for the better and the worse.

On the positive side, I found I could hold multiple concepts in my head at the same time and see how they came together without losing my train of thought. My attention span seemed to increase noticeably while my fluid problem solving skills and creativity became lightening fast relative to where they had been before.

At the same time, I noticed everything I thought about, spoke about, or spent time on, was work.

Simple socializing like small talk and joking around and comical nonsense became awkward.

The only exception was LIVEvents and LIVEshops (workshops/bootcamps) because I could rationalize to myself that “this is for work”. Events and sessions always the part of the week I looked forward to because I could have fun and let loose without feeling guilty about it.

Then as I came into 2007, I made the ambitious decision to make it the “most fun year of my life”.

Now you might think to yourself: “Having fun?? Uhhh, that’s easy!”

The difference is that when you have got a people who relies on you to produce results, or else they do not eat and there is no roof over their heads, having fun suddenly becomes a source of stress because it feels like a massive waste of time.

On top of that, and this is obviously a generalization, I had noticed over the years that most of the folks who had a talent for being relaxed and having fun also tended to be flunkies and underachievers in their professional lives.

Usually they would spend a lot of time laughing and hanging out with friends and taking life easy, which gave them a sort of care-free vibe that was attractive and contagious.

But later as I would get to know them, I realized they were projecting an illusion of coolness, because their lives were mediocre at best (and a total train wreck at worst).

I have often suspected many of these guys were burdened by a delusion that someday they would get paid just for being cool. Like a male version of Paris Hilton or Tila Tequila, I am not sure.

The problem was that a part of their “cool factor” was they lacked an inviolable personal standard for the quality of their own lives.

Their “neurologies” were never burdened down with stress or compulsive analysis because if things were not going well, they would just laugh it off and rationalize. But years of living in this zone also left them with no ability to deal with friction, setbacks, or adversity because their higher priority was maintaining the flow and their happy vibe.

In my experience, this was a form of weakness because their external circumstances often were not in alignment with the happiness of their internal world, which forced them deeper into personal denial.

Put them into a situation where avoidance and rationalization could no longer deal with their problems, and suddenly they would be whining like young children with no ability to cope.

Again, this is a generalization of many people who I met over the course of my life. But I also feel it is fairly on point in terms of the commonalities I saw in many people who on the surface seemed socially super successful.

In my early years, I remember feeling somewhat nervous and approval-seeking around these types because they had something I wished that I had myself. But as I hit my late twenties I became more indifferent, if not sympathetic, because I realized they had taken a route that would cause problems for them down the line.

I guess that is what you would call “coming into your own” – which really just means you do not buy into other people’s values above your own. Funny enough, it often makes people question themselves because you seem so confident in your own way of doing things.

Anyway, over the years, I discovered that there are actually TWO ways of getting that carefree vibe.

The first is just to ignore reality and make having fun the higher priority.

But the second, which in my view is the more powerful way of doing it, is to continually challenge yourself in your professional life while learning the art of separating work from pleasure (or having no gray area between work and play).

What they do not teach you in school is that your neurology becomes ADDICTED to whatever emotional state you are accessing most of the time.

So when you notice that most people who party all the time seem mentally retarded in their professional lives, it might seem so sad and pathetic that it turns you off of letting loose.

But at the same time, you have to also realize if you sacrifice fun for the purpose of professional success for too long, you are essentially FRYING your ability to enjoy life – which is equally short-sighted.

Doing this will lead you to a place where having fun becomes going through the motions.

You become so analytical and disconnected from the REAL EXPERIENCE of true enjoyment that you do not even know what it is anymore.

As absurd as it sounds, you wind up analyzing it the same way you would a business proposal, with an objective criteria of what fun should be instead the emotions/state/moment you are actually experiencing.

“I’m doing something interesting (or that costs a lot of money. Therefore the conditions for having fun are now met, which means I must be having fun.”

There is no ACTUAL lighting up of the “happy centers” in your neurology. That part of your neurology has withered away.

It is like if you lie in bed for a year and now all the muscles in your legs have atrophied and withered away. How much of a work out can you really do?

Maybe you can exercise lightly for a few minutes, but then after that the tissue has been worked and you are forced to take a break.

Only after a few months of repetition have you gradually built back enough muscle tissue to work it without burning it in more than a few minutes.

This is the vicious cycle which so many adults wind up trapped in without their conscious knowledge.

You are having “fun” but you are not REALLY having fun.

You are not detoxifying yourself from all the cortisone that builds up in your system at work, so there is no renewal taking place.

You show up for a fun activity because you think you are “supposed to” but the truth is you would rather be back in your work-addicted comfort zone.

It is just that if you stopped going out altogether then you would have to admit to yourself that the way you have been living is wrong.

And that is almost impossible because you have so much invested in it personally.

So what do most adults do?

They use ALCOHOL as a crutch because it stimulates those emotional pleasure centers for them.
(At least for an hour or two before they become belligerant and a pain).

To get past this, you have to make a very deliberate effort to pump up your “happy” neurology on a regular basis, so it does not lose its capacity to process those types of emotions.

That means continuing to dominate in the professional arena and producing the results that people expect from you, but at the same time, making a clear separation between work and play OR making WHAT you do come form WHO you ARE thus having no gray area.

I had noticed over the years that the fear of being perceived as incongruent was probably the biggest hurdle which held people back from reaching their potential with success. So I knew I had to get back to a space like when I was pushing envelope in terms of testing out new behavior and not caring what people thought.

The cool thing was that over about 6-10 months, it became natural and internalized. I still felt my neurology being exhausted having too many hours of fun in a row, but the threshold where that would happen was a several hours more.

As a peak performer, the temptation is to make work your entire life.

You will make vacuous statements like: “You have to be well rounded” because you THINK you are supposed to say things like this (or maybe that “balance” might make you a better performer).

But it is as much of a rationalization as the flunky who talks about how he has rejected the professional world because he is above the fray of capitalist society, when in reality he could not secure a decent job to save his life.

The key is to treat both fun and focus as different muscles that need to be worked and trained independently (even if you are training them at the same time).

More than just pride of being a true producer, there is something philosophical about being a person who can talk about their dreams and really achieve them (as opposed to telling yourself random lies).

But you ALSO have to force yourself to laugh and have fun throughout the day. Otherwise your dreams will probably turn out to be meaningless.

That is because when you have lost your capacity for true abandonment, you wind up doing things just to do them. For no real reason at all.

I think Robert Pirsig hit the nail on the head when he said: “Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum.”

Peak performance is the art of being fully engaged with “focused present energy” and then renewing your mind and spirit with total relaxation and being fully unplugged.

And the cool thing is that by combining hard work and having fun synergistically, I finally HAVE been able to have the most fun year of my life.

The adventures this year never could have happened if I have not taken it to the next level in terms of my work ethic, but at the same time, I was actually able to enjoy them because I had also taken the effort to make having fun a personal priority.

So in my opinion you CAN have your cake and eat it too. (just like Jesus said we could!)

You do NOT have to become another victim of the professional world any more than you have to become a victim of being a burnt out party-person.

Moderation.
Harmony.

The Greeks have been talking about it for thousands of years and deep down you probably knew it was true.

My hope is that as I evolve and progress, people can look at me and say: “That guy is a really hard worker, but he also seems like a harmonious, cool guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously.”

The whole cartoon character thing is OK in your twenties because you are LEARNING and it is about trial-and-error.

In your thirties, it is about as uncool as holding onto existential angst. Uhh, NO.

There is a time and a place for everything, and I think that as you get older, you really need to work all this stuff out.