Why I Don’t Want to be Smart

I hate the word smart. It comes steeped in so many connotations that I’m always skeptical when someone uses this word to describe me. A on a paper – smart; correct someone’s spelling – smart, maybe a know it all, but smart; remember the name of the man whose assassination was the catalyst for WWI (archduke Franz Ferdinand) – smart. Smart can mean dorky, smart can mean pretentious, smart can mean you’re expected to have all the answers. Frankly, I don’t want to be smart. Cue gasps (sorry mom and dad).

What I do want to be is educated, intellectual, motivated, maybe even talented. To be labeled as smart comes with too much baggage and the wrong kind of assumptions. Take me and my step-brother, for example. We both went to the same high school and college, we both got about the same grades, thus both of us have been called “smart.” But we’re completely different. He can look at a textbook and memorize it’s contents, I need to take thorough notes and study. He’s an excellent test taker, I’m average. Where he excels in the ability to retain information, I excel in hard work. We got the same grades because where I was struggling to understand concepts he was struggling to put forth the effort. I work harder, he knows more facts. So who is “smarter?”

Take jeopardy, the game where your smartness means nothing if you can’t hit the buzzer at exactly the right time, and if you are able to do both, well, that’s just talent. A baseball player or coach’s ability to analyze the game, know the physics, strategy, and history of the sport, is that talent or smarts? Every time someone refers to someone else as “smart” I start thinking about how different that person’s brand of smarts is from mine. No he just works hard; no he just knows facts; no she’s just talented; no he’s all talk; no she just has a big vocabulary. Not smart. None of these qualifications for smart seem to add up to anything cohesive. Street smart, book smart, hard working, photographic memory – these are all contradictions, yet they all fall under the category of smart. With this, the whole ideology behind smart begins to unravel itself.

The concept of smart is a flawed one; it is a generalization that seeks to rank individual worth, but as I’ve hopefully shown, we all express completely different types of smarts. I think it’s time to develop a new go-to vocabulary to acknowledge people’s strengths, then we can step back and see how interdependent we are on one another instead of trying to make a hierarchy out of the rigid smart/dumb binary we are so wrapped up in. If it weren’t for the science minds out there, I wouldn’t have a computer or an iPhone, and if it weren’t for people like me, those people wouldn’t have art and literature or this blog for that matter. I’m throwing smart out in exchange for creative, articulate, and educated, what about you?