The Smartest Dumb Person I Know
How to become aware of blind spots that hold many engineers back.
Part One: Blind Spots
There is a phrase I have heard more than once in my life from people who knew me well.
“You are the smartest dumb person I know.”
Early in my career, I did not really know what they meant. I understood the words, but I did not understand the diagnosis. It sounded like a contradiction, maybe even an insult wrapped in affection. Today I know exactly what they were talking about.
They were not saying I lacked intelligence. They were saying I was not always making wise choices. Not always using good judgment. Not always applying patience, translation, timing, humility, or useful action. I was executing quickly and still mishandling the moments that were critical. I could be technically or logically correct, have good ideas and still completely wrong in my delivery, execution, and more.
I would often be right about the technical issue and still fail to make the point useful to the people around me. I could connect ideas faster than others and still miss the human, relational, or practical layer that made the insight matter or the decision wrong.
That is the part many very smart people need to confront.
There is a moment in some engineering meetings when everyone can tell who understood the problem first, and the work still does not get better because of it.
I have seen this happen around a test result that did not make sense. The engineer at the whiteboard saw the pattern before anyone else. He understood why the thermal model was under-predicting heat soak during endurance testing, why the first correction would only move the problem downstream, and why the team needed to revisit the boundary condition before changing the hardware. His mind moved quickly, and the conclusion was probably right.
But something was definitely wrong. The team wasn’t buying in. There were other priorities that were competing with this idea and those ideas were captivating the team. The engineer knew that this simple change might unlock everything. But the engineer wasn’t considering this in the moment.
Not because the team was stupid. Not because the work was simple. He lost the conversation because he treated speed as authority. He moved from insight to irritation too quickly. He assumed that because the pattern was obvious to him, the delay in everyone else seeing it was a failure of intelligence rather than a normal part of building shared understanding. By the time he finished, the best idea in the meeting had become harder to use because the person carrying it had not translated it well enough for others to act.
That is one of the strange dangers of intelligence.
Before I delve into this next section, I have not applied to Mensa and probably never will. I know my IQ and I do not advertise it anymore. That is not the point of this treatise. I have observed many engineers over the course of the 30 years I’ve been in the engineering talent acquisition space. Many brilliant engineers who, like me, most likely score far above the average. Also, to be clear, this article may or may not apply to you. I don’t think that these ideas are universally true. However, I have observed this to be mostly true. Also, I would like to say that the concepts that go forward in the rest of this article are important, but it may very well strike a nerve. If you find yourself triggered by this article, then it is very likely that this article is one of the most important things you will ever read.
Being keenly aware of what follows can prevent many mistakes.
