What are some stupid things that smart people do?
Here are but a few of my favorite stupid things smart people tend to do:
Ignoring the importance of design and style - When the iPod originally came out, technical people complained about its lack of features and perceived high price ("ooh, who cares about another MP3 player; I can go buy one at Best Buy for $50." In the meantime, it was so cool and easy to use that normal people went out in droves to buy it.•
Using terrible tools, and taking pride in their awfulness - especially common with programmers, who take pride in using programming languages and text editors that have been designed by programmers, not updated since the 1970s, and never touched by anyone with a modicum of design sense. They believe that mastering arcane, over-complicated commands and processes are a mark of pride, rather than a waste of time. I will refrain from singling out specifc programming languages and tools here, be-cause smart people also like to get caught up in pointless fame wars about this sort of thing.
Following the pack - Many smart people often seem to be followers, probably because they grow up spending so much time pleasing others via academic and extracurricu-lar achievement that they never fgure out what they really like to work on or try anything unique. Smart people from top schools tend to fock into the same few elite felds, as they try to keep on achieving what other people think they should achieve, rather than fguring out whatever it is they intrinsically want to do.•
Failing to develop social skills - Some smart people focus exclusively on their narrow area of interest and never realize that everything important in life is accomplished through other people. Tey never try to improve their so-cial skills, learn to network, or self-promote, and ofen denigrate people who excel in these areas. If you are al-ready a good engineer, you are going to get 10x the return on time spent improving how you relate to other people compared to learning the next cool tool.•
Focusing on being right above all else - Many smart peo-ple act as if being right trumps all else, and go around bluntly letting people know when they are wrong, as if this will somehow endear others to them. Tey also be-lieve that they can change other people's minds through argument and facts, ignoring how emotional and irratio-nal people actually are when it comes to making decisions or adopting beliefs.•
Letting success in one area lead to overconfdence in oth-ers - Smart people sometimes think that just because they are expert in their feld, they are automatically qualifed in areas about which they know nothing. For instance, doc-tors have a reputation as being bad investors.•
Underrating effort and practice - For smart people, many things come easily without much effort. Tey're constant-ly praised for "being smart" whenever they do anything well. Te danger is that they become so reliant on feeling smart and having people praise them, that they avoid do-ing anything that they're not immediately great at. Tey start to believe that if you're not good at something from the beginning, you're destined to always be terrible at it, and the thing isn't worth doing. Tese smart people fail to further develop their natural talents and eventually fall behind others who, while less initially talented, weren't as invested in "being smart" and instead spent more time practicing. •
Engaging in zero sum competitions with other smart people - Many smart people tend to fock to felds which are already saturated with other smart people. only a lim-ited number of people can become a top investment bank-er, law partner, Fortune 500 Ceo, humanities professor, or Jeopardy champion. Yet smart people let themselves be funneled into these felds and relentlessly compete with each other for limited slots. Tey all but ignore other ar-eas where they could be successful, and that are less over-run by super-smart people. Instead of thinking outside the box, smart people ofen think well within a box, a very competitive box that has been set up by other people and institutions to further someone else's interests at the ex-pense of the smart person.•
Excessively focusing on comparing their achievements with others - Smart people who have been raised in a typical achievement-focused family or school can get anx-ious about achievement to the point of ridiculousness. Tis leads to people earnestly asking questions like: “If I haven't succeeded in my mid 20s, could I be successful in the rest of my life?” and “Are you a failure if you are not a billionaire by age 30? What about 40?” •
Ignoring diminishing returns on information - Smart people are ofen voracious readers and can absorb huge quantities of information on any subject. They get caught up in reading every last bit of information on subjects that interest them, like investing, lifehacking, or tech specs of products they're planning on buying. While some in-formation is useful in making a decision, poring through the vast amount of information available online can be a waste of time. Tey end up spending a lot of time gather-ing information without taking action.
Elitism - Smart people ofen use smartness as measure of the entire worth of a person. Tey fail to see the value in or even relate with people who are diferent. Tis is illus-trated by the Yale professor who doesn't have the slightest idea what to say to his plumber.