Are you smart enough?

I remember a moment in time when I was perhaps 8 or 9 years old. I don't recall my exact age at the time, but I do recall the situation clearly. I was at school and we were sitting in a classroom, taking some form of standardized test to determine whether we were "smart" or "intelligent" enough to qualify for the more advanced science class. At the time, this class would introduce young kids to computers and, as far as I know, also introduce them to BASIC programming. I was deemed "not smart enough", and this left 8 year old me believing that “not smart enough”, was a critical character flaw that I could do nothing about.

Looking back, I was very disappointed and somehow, I didn't say anything to anyone about it. I felt like "less" of a person, because I didn't "have what it takes". I don't think I'm particularly unique in that regard; I think lots of people experienced something similar, or worse. Over time, this experience helped frame my thinking around being "smart" or "intelligent". I don't consider myself either of those things and in fact, I don't even consider the meaning of "smart" or "intelligent", nor do I debate the meaning. I might occasionally explain that I am "not particularly smart", but it's really just a communication thing to convey a concept using language others understand. I certainly don't attempt to measure other people based on the meaning and I struggle to understand why others see value in it.

I tend to view things through a lens of "do you know how to..." or "have you done ... before" or "would you like to attempt to do...". This makes more sense to me, because younger me didn't get to experience a very specific opportunity to learn, and worse, I was never guided towards "here's how you can close the gap so that you can learn this...". Instead of being a positive educational experience, I was on the receiving end of a negative educational experience that framed a big part of my first 18+ years on this planet.

This negative childhood experience helped adult me me to fearlessly say "I don't know" when in fact "I don't know." I think this makes me more approachable, because I'm going to allow you to teach me something I don't know. I'm going to take the time and ask you questions to help me understand. I'm going to help you succeed, by walking the path with you. I think this is what the younger me would have wanted, at the time.

Something I really enjoy about Amazon's PeopleExperience and Technology (PXT) is that we don't have it all figured out, but we are walking the path to get there. We have really hard problems to solve and the solutions are not easy nor obvious. I'm writing this as I sit in Boston, working with a bunch of teams while we're passionately debating some hard decisions we want to make. We're making trade-offs, we're simplifying and we are re-adjusting our expectations while making important course corrections. We're challenging our thinking. We can do that because we're sharing knowledge, insight and experience, We're listening to each other. These things are much easier if you aren't over indexing on "who is the smartest person in the room".

*Image generated in ChatGPT, using prompt: "Generate an image of a classroom full of young children taking a standardized test"