I’m not all that smart, and the little smartness I have tends to get me in trouble. Case in point:
Some time last year, I went out with a bunch of successful doctor bros.
One of them had a fancy new coat that looked like it was made out of albino lamb skin. Another doctor bro complimented the coat and asked where it came from.
“I got it in Milan. I went there for a trip last month.”
“Oh yeah, how was it?” somebody asked.
“Really interesting,” the lambskin coat owner said. “Lots of cool architecture. Lots of famous art.”
“Did you go to see The Last Supper?” I chimed in.
Silence.
“No,” the coat eventually said. “Is that in Milan?”
I tried to waffle and hedge a bit. But it was too late. I could see the hatred of a hundred dead lambs staring at me.
And that’s exactly what I mean. You try to seem smart — “Oh yeah, I know something about Milan!” — and you end up kicking yourself in the shin.
Maybe you think I’m reading too much into this little interaction.
Maybe so.
But there seems to be a lot of agreement among many experts of persuasion that the most fundamental, most central, most core human motivation…
Is the need to be OKAY. To seem smart. To feel important. Call it what you will.
The thing is, this need is relative.
In other words, I can only feel as OKAY and as smart and as important as you are NOT.
And so, if you try to be smart, like I tend to do — stupid, stupid! — you end up alienating people and making it harder to achieve your goals.
At least that’s what I’m discovering.
And that’s why I’m struggling and striving to beat smartness and the need for OKAYness out of all of my communication.
If you want to see some examples of how that works, check out the link below. I promise it will be the least intellectually impressive thing you will read all day: