Sitting down to think about intelligence, and where you personally fit in the scale of human intelligence in the world is a really intersting thought.
For me this starts with my mind instantly going “ok sooooooo many people are wayyyyyy smarter than I am!”.
And then I slowly start to reason with myself “well ok I mean yes there is a huge swath of the world population that I would be more intelligent than” **
Ok so were at the real stopping point now, for me I realize “there are definitely tons of people smarter than me in the world. But realistically there is also a large amount of people that I am more intelligent than, or at the very least more street smart and book smart than”.
But then the real questions is how do you know where you fit? Am I right in the middle, 49% of people are smarter than me, and 49% of people are dumber than me? How would anyone actually figure this out? I’m aware of IQ tests but I’ve never taken one as they seem completely flawed. How would a hand written paper test truly tell the overall intelligence of a person?
What if the persons emotional intelligence is off the chart and they can build amazing advertisements than resonate with most people because they really know how to read people? Or on the flip side of that equation, what if the person is just amazingly knock your socks off good at Math, but they don’t have the emotional intelligence to interact well with other people? Who is more intelligent in that scenario? Sure raw horsepower intelligence the brilliant math mathematician scores higher. But who will live a more meaningful life?
The person who knows how to read and interact with people will most likely in my view end up leading the more enjoyable and “successful” life. I put the term successful in quotes because it’s such a loaded term, the definition changes for everyone. I do think however that we could agree upon a foundational definition of successful. One core pilliar of life seems to be about happiness.
How much happiness you can bring yourself, and how much happiness you can bring to other people that you love. Another core pillar, which really could probably be combined with happiness is “you must do some good in the world, add something of value to someone other than yourself”.
This differs for everyone, some people extended this circle all the way out to include entire countries, or even the entire population of the world. Other people keep their circle close and try to better their lives, their families lives, and the lives of all their friends and loved ones. In my mind there really is no moral high ground between those two scenarios. The person who wants to help the entire world, that is the way they get joy in their life. That is their calling, so really they are just helping everyone else because it makes them feel good, it stirs their soul. The same things goes for the person helping the people in their immediate circle.
This is also an argument to some degree of quality over quantity. If you dig in and find the proper way to leverage your intelligence and skills to improve your life and the life of people in your close circle of the world, you will most likely have a pretty big impact on those people and really improve their life.
It’s massively hard to try and improve the lives of strangers. It is also often the case seemingly in our society that the people who scream and shout that things are not fair and the government should provide more, those people are not successful. They are getting crushed by the weight of the capitalism “game”. They have not figured out how to play the game, because it is a sad but very true reality – you can take a rich person and make them poor and they will be rich again in 5 years. You can take a poor person and make them rich and they will “most likely” be poor again in 5 years.
So many people know so little about playing this game of capitalism that they scream and shout that the entire game needs to change. One very important caveat is that not everyone starts at the same starting line. If you are born white, and a man, in the US or any major developed country you will need the least amount of effort to win the game. White men are basically starting from the ladies tee’s in golf, it’s important to acknowledge that because we absolutely should be trying to even up that starting line. But beyond that, once the race starts and a person is around 12 years old and starting to form their own thoughts and opinions, that is when you really start taking over the wheel for yourself. And certainly by the time you move out of your parents house you are directly affecting the trajectory of your life with each decision you make.
Do you mistakenly have a child before you are financially stable and cause the rest of your life to be needlessly challenging? If someone wants to have a kid early in life by all means go for it! Just also do it while acknowledging that it is going to be so much harder for you, you are basically choosing to run a race on one leg against everyone else. If on the other hand you choose to get a job and save as much of your income as possible, and then put that income into something like a Vanguard index fund – you are setting your life up to be so much easier/happier/more rewarding and fun. You will also accumulate a surplus of resources that you can share with others and help try to boost them up the ladder of life.
Ok so we definitely rambled off of the main topic a bit there hahaha but the main question I had revolving around in my mind when I started writing this was: how would someone know where they stand in terms of intelligence of the entire population on earth? It seems to be a question that I do not have an answer for in my mind, maybe one will come to me in the future and I can write it down on this blog 🙂
** One thing that really skews this is how amazingly lucky my life has been. I was born in the USA, have 2 loving parents and close family. Went to public school that was at least decent, and then went to a college that was solid as well. But honestly it does feel like school never really had much to do with intelligence and or knowledge. I definitely learned things in school, but more social interactions than actual hard knowledge. I’ve figured out the vast majority of skills on my own or at least doing them my own way”.
