Transcription
What if the kind of genius most people admire is not actually the kind that matters most in real life? And you know what I mean here. The person who can solve abstract problems quickly. The person who dominates exams and wins arguments.
But in my experience as both a peer-reviewed scholar and educator for the past 13 years, I've come to understand the factors that truly matter for success. And so in this video I'm going to discuss the renowned researcher Robert Sternberg's book wisdom intelligence and creativity synthesized overview the four layer framework of intelligence he has established and show you how to use this framework to become more effective and impactful than everyone around you.
So let's start with the first layer here what Sternberg calls analytical intelligence and one of the best ways to understand this concept is through the ancient Greek thinker Thales of Myitus. You see, Thales was among a class of philosophers at the time who hypothesized about what the world was made of. The hypothesis, well, it was that everything in the world was made of water. Now, whether that sounds naive to us today is not the point here. The point is that Thales was doing something revolutionary. He was trying to explain the world by means of a rational unified principle rather than mythic storytelling. He was asking in effect what reality is made of at its deepest level. And this is a prime example of analytical intelligence. The disciplined attempt to see structure beneath appearances.
But now here's the thing. More and more we find ourselves living in a culture, especially within the entrepreneurship community, that often finds this kind of abstract reasoning to be pointless. In fact, I've been one of those entrepreneurs myself. Throughout my years of doing everything from front-facing sales to running a test prep business, I've encountered and sometimes even engaged in this toxic anti-intellectual trend of trashing not only academics but also trashing college and traditional education altogether. And this mirrors what Thales experienced. You see, just like modern entrepreneurship bros, Thal's friends often made fun of him, telling him he was just wasting his time thinking about things that didn't make him money.
But so who's really right here? Well, Sternberg's work is especially helpful on this point because one of his major criticisms of the intelligence field is that it often puts, as he states, the cart before the horse, defining intelligence by how tests measure it rather than by what intelligence actually is. In his theory of successful intelligence, spelled out in this book, analytical ability still matters a great deal, but it's only one part of the picture. You see, when I started out in business myself, I had a great deal of academic skill under my belt. I could write essays, publish texts, perform well in formal debates, and of course, score high on tests. But none of that ended up helping me in the real world. Like for instance, when I had to feed myself, which then takes us to the second layer Sternberg lays out in this framework, practical intelligence.
So this is where Thal's example becomes even more interesting because after being mocked by his friends for the supposed uselessness of his theoretical knowledge, Thales achieved something incredible. He used his knowledge to secure the rights to olive presses in advance of a coming harvest. When the harvest was strong and demand surged, he rented the presses out at a profit. And Thales did this mainly because he wanted to prove a point. Namely, that philosophers could become rich if they wanted to, but that wealth was just not their highest aim. In other words, Thales could think abstractly, but he could also operate effectively in the world when he chose to.
And this is key because throughout all my time in the academic world, I've witnessed a second toxic culture that mirrors the anti-intellectual and anti-academic one I talked about before. And that is the academic tendency to treat practical pursuits, business, entrepreneurship, execution, persuasion, logistics, money as something dirty or just beneath serious thinkers. But that is just the inverse form of the same sort of stupidity. Yes, the entrepreneur who despises theory is pretty stupid. But the intellectual who despises practical execution is, as Sternberg's theory suggests, stupid, just in a different way. What I've called realworld genius requires both.
You see, Sternberg's theory of successful intelligence is especially clear here. He defines successful intelligence as the ability to achieve one's goals in life given one's socioultural context by capitalizing on strengths and correcting or compensating for weaknesses in order to adapt to, shape, and select environments through a combination of analytical, creative, and practical abilities. And that phrase adapt to shape and select environments is crucial. And so practical intelligence isn't just some vague notion of street smarts or charisma or hustle. Instead, it's the ability to read the real constraints of a situation and act effectively within them.
And circling back for a moment to my initial experiences starting my first business straight out of academia. This is precisely why my academic ability of knowing how to construct good arguments, for instance, simply didn't transfer into my ability to understand, for instance, when I should make what type of argument, what types of people will respond to what type of language, and when I should simply shut up, listen, and not make any argument at all. And this is why so many academically brilliant people struggle when they leave the classroom. They have trained heavily in analysis but poorly in adaptation. They know how to critique a business model but not how to actually run one. They know how to explain incentives but not how to negotiate with an actual human being. And again the entrepreneurial world has the reverse problem. Plenty of people can sell, push, scale, and posture, but cannot think rigorously for 10 uninterrupted minutes. And so Sternberg's point and mine here is that real world genius is integrative.
But now once we start to integrate and practice both, we need to begin to master the third layer here, creative intelligence. Now this is where a lot of people get confused because they think creativity just means being original, artistic, weird, or spontaneous. But Sternberg's work is much more precise than that. In the broader theory of successful intelligence, creative intelligence is the ability to go beyond the given to generate ideas, frameworks, or solutions that are not simply copies of what one has already been taught. And in what he calls his propulsion theory of creative contributions, again laid out in this book, Sternberg goes even deeper by arguing that creativity itself comes in different forms depending on how an idea moves a field. And he identifies eight types of creative activity, but I'll only go through six here. And as we review these types, try to identify where you currently fit in here.
The first type is replication. These types of creative contributions preserve the current direction of a field, such as copying an artwork done in watercolors into oil paints. Basically the same idea with slight variation. The second type is forward incrementation. An example of this would be the next scientific experiment in a long research program. The next step people are already prepared to accept. The third type is advanced forward incrementation in which a person moves a field far ahead of where people are ready to go such as Xerox's early graphical computer interface which arrived before the culture was ready. The fourth type is called redirection. This is when someone redirects the field entirely such as the cognitive revolution in psychology in which phenomena once explained in purely behavioral terms started getting reframed explicitly in terms of mental mechanisms. The fifth is called reconstruction in which one approaches an old starting point so a new direction becomes possible such as for example the Renaissance return to classical Greek and Roman texts which became the launching point for entirely new developments in art politics and philosophy. And finally, there's the sixth type, integration, in which a person synthesizes previously separate lines of thought into something larger, such as, for example, the invention of the sea plane, which literally integrates two previously distinct technologies into a new category.
And so, creativity, as Sternberg argues, is more about propulsion than about simply coming up with a new idea. And so, ask yourself, what does your contribution do to the structure around it? Does it merely repeat it? Does it clarify anything? Does it advance the field? Does it redirect it? And this is an incredibly useful framework you can use in whatever you're currently working on. But it also helps explain why so many smart people become intellectually stagnant. Analytical intelligence lets you understand the current game. Sure, practical intelligence even lets you play it, but creative intelligence lets you change the rules entirely.
But now that we've explored these first three layers, we can now understand the fourth and arguably the most important layer. What Sternberg calls simply wisdom. There's an old saying often cited as a Japanese proverb that states, "Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare." And whether or not we know the exact origin of this line, the underlying point here is spoton. namely that the world is full of people who spend all their time in armchair intellectualizing, but it's also full of people engaging in raw execution without any reflection whatsoever. The first group becomes what I'll call the daydreamers. And the second group becomes what I'll call the nightmare creators.
Academics often have valid reasons for rejecting the nightmare creators. They've seen what happens when clever, cunning people rise to success without developing ethical awareness without historical understanding and without reflection. You get systems optimized for profit that take no account of long-term consequences, incentive structures that reward manipulation and corruption and technologies launched without any regard whatsoever for the truth. At the same time, entrepreneurs often have valid reasons for rejecting the daydreamers. They've seen endless critique without any kind of real actionable solutions, idealistic theories that are so out of touch with the experiences of ordinary people, and moral posturing without any understanding of the day-to-day constraints of an operation.
And so, it should now be easier to understand why the conflict between these two worlds exists. But the deeper problem is this. The worst members of both worlds, the daydreamers and the nightmare creators, are often the most influential. Yet, they're also the most lacking in wisdom. But isn't wisdom kind of a vague concept? Well, Sternberg defines this not only linguistically, but through psychometric standards of construct validity, which is just a fancy way of saying it's something measurable. In his balance theory, wisdom is the application of successful intelligence and creativity as mediated by values toward the achievement of a common good through balancing intrapersonal, interpersonal, and extrapols over the short and long-term in order to adapt to, shape, and select environments.
Okay, so that's a dense definition, but it's I believe one of the best definitions. And why do I say this? Well, on this view, wisdom means you do not simply maximize your own interests. You balance your interests with the interests of others and with the larger systems you inhabit. On this view, you don't think only about immediate outcomes. Instead, you think about long-term consequences. And importantly, you don't merely adjust to the world as it is. Sometimes you actively shape the environments in the world, and sometimes you walk away from those environments.
And so in a world that worships IQ or even practical skills, Sternberg argues that all it takes is a brief look at our world today to see clearly that these two alone have failed us. After all, there are brilliant people who use their gifts for the most evil of crimes. And there are highly skilled business executives who practice the greatest depravities behind closed doors. Yet, there are also those who, even with moderate intelligence, are making a greater impact through their wisdom than any of those other people ever could.
If you want to keep leveling up your critical thinking to make a massive impact not only on your own life, but also on the lives of countless others, then be sure to watch this next.