Thick Enough to be Bright

‘Where all think alike, no one thinks very much’ ~ Walter Lippmann

You are familiar with that very bright classmate who always topped the grades right through all levels of schooling, and ended up as a well-off or struggling engineer. Or medical practitioner. You are also familiar with that wet block of wood who was always at the centre of anything extra-curricular or irregular that was going down, owned his average grades all through school, never made it for a regular call-up to public university, but is somehow doing so much better than his genius mates in terms of resources and assets that you question the logic of education. Rest assured, this is not a unique scenario. If you were to check the list of top funders and founders across the world and especially in the Silicon Valley, it should not surprise you to find that a good number of them never attended university, and some did not even finish high school. There is even a quip that ‘A’ students are mere academicians and theorists, ‘B’ students are bureaucrats and ‘C’ students are the capitalists and entrepreneurs. This is fate providing labels on boxes which we lazily jump into.

The reality is that being book-smart does not automatically propel one to the top, despite all the myths to the contrary. It is a common refrain nowadays that academically bright people often end up working for someone less smart and less talented than themselves, whose chief talent is sometimes self-promotion and a street-savvy capacity for self-preservation. Sadly, school or college results are no indication of whether one will be a failure or success in life.

Does this mean there is no sense to our various education systems where the basic objective is to cram and pass examinations? Perhaps. Education stakeholders in Kenya are currently grappling with this fundamental question and I wish them well. For me the real mystery is why do the not-so-bright guys get rich and the smart guys stay poor? The context here of course is for upright, law-abiding citizens.

There are a number of good reasons. Common knowledge is that the intelligent deep thinking person often suffers from "paralysis through analysis". They will analyze and analyze a particular opportunity, and doubtless find all sorts of reasons why it just won't work. And they proceed to do nothing. A-students and 1st-class graduates are bad enough at this, but PhDs are much worse. By contrast, the dumb guy just comes in and does it. And succeeds! Why? Because they are too dumb to do anything else. It never occurs to this person to sit around contemplating his navel all day. They have little self-doubt (doubtless because they haven't sat around reading Plato, Nietzsche and Levinas all day), and generally have a can-do mentality.

Most smart guys suffer from the syndrome of the over-talented, meaning they are pretty good at learning most anything they put their hand to and hence can achieve proficiency at most anything. However, persistence is another matter altogether. You see, the smart guy is drowning in opportunity. He doesn't know which of the many paths to take. Once he takes one, he changes direction as soon as the going gets tough (or worse, just as soon as boredom sets in!).

By contrast, there are some people who are only good at one thing and can do nothing else. Through focusing relentlessly on this one thing, they get astonishingly good at it. The musician Bruce Springsteen jokingly refers to this at times in his concerts when he says that he couldn't play sports, he was no good at math, and he couldn't get a girl. The only thing he was any good at was playing guitar! And the rest is history. Another example of single-mindedness is Michael Jackson. Apart from his latter-day, well-documented and self-inflicted indebtedness, we all marveled at his singing, dancing and songwriting ability at the age of 40. But then again, how good would you have been at 40 if you had also started when you were only five years old, and done nothing else all your life? I would hazard a guess that you'd be pretty damn good!

Take the true story of one Njoroge, mentally challenged and scientifically dumb. Rather than sit and beg for handouts like his contemporaries, in 2014 he went to the Manchester Travelers SACCO in Thika Town and asked them for work as a parking assistant. The SACCO had 100 buses and each paid him Kshs.20 per day for his daily upkeep, thereby making him Kshs.2,000 per day. He chose to take 10% of this for his daily use and saved the balance of Kshs.1,800 daily with the SACCO. Suffice it to say, 4 years later in 2017 he had saved enough to take possession of a brand new 32-seater minibus from the local Nairobi Isuzu franchise. His math had no option but to be simple.

Smart guys won't stoop too low. They won't touch things that are beneath them. They think that once they have a degree qualification, the world is theirs for the asking; the world owes them. If you have a Law degree from Harvard, would you in your formative years upon graduation say, work in a restaurant, or maybe start a shoe shop? Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko in the bestseller, ‘The Millionaire Next Door’ revealed that the vast majority of millionaires in America made their money in standard businesses like restaurants, dry cleaners, shoe shops and so on. How many university graduates on the African continent will enter such professions? Most would rather work for someone else in return for a higher than national average salary, the right to wear fancy expensive clothes on the job, and the faint promise of company benefits like a car somewhere down the line. We really do not have to try too hard while at it and so naturally, with our sense of entitlement we sometimes make pathetic employees with poor work ethics.

Dumb guys by comparison will do whatever it takes to reach their goal. If their goal is money, and they are single-minded about it, they will just keep beating away at it until they finally succeed. When they don’t qualify for university, rather than wait for the intake time to then apply, they quickly enroll into middle-level colleges for this certificate or that diploma, or simply pick up one trade or another to make themselves useful and avoid the smirks and wisecracks in their hood. If they do make it to university, they graduate with a reasonable 2nd-Class degree and knowing odds of success are stacked against them, immediately roll up their sleeves and get to work, hassling, if they weren’t already doing so while in campus. There's no running home to cry to mummy. Heck, they just keep going and going and going! They don't know when to stop and one day, well, they end up wealthier and more successful than many. In fact, we end up working for them.

Smart guys with that intelligensia chip on their shoulder, think the world owes them a living. So-called dumb guys don't. In a recent New York Post video https://nyp.st/2nUWCI0 one Don Ward has no scruples heckling his way to US$900 a day shining shoes. In Manhattan no less.

We smart guys whine something like ‘I've got this degree in Fine Art, and I've self-published a book of poems ad infinitum, but I just can't seem to get a break. I'm talented and with it, but I'm being ignored. It's a done deal for me. I come from the wrong tribe. You've either got to know someone, or have money. And me, I don't have either’. In my first job in Sales, I recall hauling a bag of cheap plastic-ware around the streets of Nairobi, ducking City Council security officers as well as petty thieves in a bid to sell something and earn the Kshs.10/= commission per piece. What was I thinking? ‘I have good education and a great family background; I shouldn't have to be doing this!’ Entitlement.

Here's a simple fact the dumb guys know that the smart guys usually don't. Success, and wealth - if you choose to measure success that way - takes effort, process, persistence, determination, large amounts of disappointment, and sheer guts. Giving up first time, saying ‘I tried it and it doesn't work; It's a scam; That’s just the way things are’, won't do. Single-minded purpose is the call, meaning you decide on the one thing you really want and stick at it through thick and thin, teargas and chants, come what may, until you get it. Most people simply cannot do that. That is why most people end up at best in the middle class, intellectually postulating in social spots on every topic under the sun, dissatisfied and unhappy, especially the smart ones. Indeed, majority of the people who do not vote belong to this class; too smart to queue in the sun.

Smart guys don't even use 10% of what they've got, while dumb guys give it all, as little as it may be. Smart guys don't also know how to market themselves, how to hassle. They are too smart to ask dumb people about stuff that they do not understand and would rather use a search engine. They think if they build a better mousetrap, the world is duty-bound to beat a path to their door. So they just sit there, swapping high-brow intellectual witticisms, and wait. And wait. And wait. Unlike what one of the dumbest smart guys by the name Steve Jobs once postulated – Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

Anyway, who is really ‘smart’ here? Is it the person with a lot of degree certificates from Nairobi to Olympia, who knows how to play that game of knowledge-garnering well, but is seemingly incapable of playing the game of life? Or is it the person who, perhaps without any fancy education, knows how to interact with the world in a way that makes whatever they have to offer more appealing, and optimizes the results that he or she gets?

Truth be told, majority of the products of Kenya’s 8-4-4 system were handed a raw deal in having to study and cram snippets of ‘intelligence’ in the name of subjects that had no chance of relevance in their latter professional lives such as home-science, art & craft and music - for those with no iota of artistry in them. It may have been better for education administrators to first find ways of narrowing down on one’s innate talents, interests, skills and strengths, then pushing all efforts and endeavours towards nurturing these to the epitome of each individual’s potential, through the various levels of learning. And now smart technology creeps in and starts making us all dumber by the day.

But all is not lost, and we can take the point and get the lesson. Don't be too smart for your own good. Don't be blind to opportunity simply because your eyes are too busy contemplating your degree certificate. Don't be over-sensitive. Get out there. Success is a contact sport. Take chances. Get beat up once in a while. In rugby, the suicidal pass to the winger besieged by two defenders sometimes births adrenalin-induced genius that changes the winger forever. Be willing to lose, to fail, once in a while. Be prepared to be scammed once or twice too in your pursuit to find out what actually works. Regard everything as a learning experience, and keep on trying. Be employed before you go employing.

Between where you are now and where you want to be in life, there are an unknown, but finite, number of mistakes to be made, and which must be made. So, resolve to make those mistakes just as fast as you possibly can.