I'm now going to tell you something all adults know, but which they try to hide from you with all means: Being bright is just a waste of time.
Even before you begin school, your parents try to convince you that you have to be intelligent to succeed in life. Then your teachers go on with the same thing, saying things like "it would be stupid to think that..." or "for any intelligent person, it's obvious that...", as if it had been better to be bright than stupid. Your school-mates will believe it, and they may tease each other saying "Gosh, you're silly!" or "If you're that stupid, you're beyond all help".
That's completely wrong. If you're stupid, you don't even need help. You already have the means to rule the world.
This at first may seem surprising. Surely, if you're bright, you will take the right decisions. You will avoid stupid mistakes. You can anticipate what other people will do. Nope. That's all wrong.
First, if you're bright you may sometimes be more likely to take the right decisions. But most problems you'll see in real life are so complex, that there are no logical conclusions to make. The people during the middle ages, who denied that the earth circled around the sun, were not the idiots. The complete idiots guessed wildly in all directions, and occasionally got it right. The bright people looked at the facts that were available at the time, and made the logical conclusion that the earth doesn't move, because we can see that it doesn't. A couple of hundred years later with the invention of the telescope, facts suddenly pointed the other direction, and the bright people had to admit that they had been wrong all the time, and some crack-pots had been right.
Second, if you're bright you will avoid stupid errors. But on the other hand, there are such a lot of intelligent errors, that it's more than enough for you to commit an impressive lot every single day. No one will bother to make a difference between the errors you make because you're too bright and the ones you make because you didn't think at all.
Third, you have no chance of anticipating what other people will do, if you're exceptionally intelligent, because they aren't, and consequently their behaviour is completely haphazard. Before the second World War, there were both bright and completely insane people, who thought Britain ought to declare Germany war. And there were both bright and silly people, who thought Britain should stay out of it. Now afterwards, we can say that the people who wanted Britain to declare war were "right", whether they were right because of a brilliant analysis of the situation (probably extremely rare), or because they were as stark raving mad as Hitler, so they understood such a nob was possible.
Once, dear children, you get out in real life, you will see hoards of extremely successful people and companies, who have no idea what's going on. There are of course some reasons for success. It's not always completely random, who gets the good bits in life. But none of the major factors have very much with brain capacity to do. Some things, which may bring you to the top are:
Few organisations probably have achieved as much antagonists as some of our most successful consultancy firms. When there is a problem in a company, a consultancy firm is usually paid to send some wise guys, who have absolutely no idea about anything. They pull this off time after time, and even companies, who agree that they were ripped off last time, will happily spend more money on consultants the next time. And that money is in fact well invested! You see, it's bad with clueless consultants running your business, but it's often much worse, if someone else does it.
I have had things delivered to me from America with some of the absolutely best courier services in the world. None of them has yet got my phone number right. One courier service shipped a package back across the Atlantic, because they gave up calling me. The phone number they had tried dialling in Europe was the one to the shipper in the US without country code. Another courier service decided my package should not leave the airport. I called them every day for two weeks, trying to get to know the reason for the delay. Every single time I had to give my phone number again, as they "didn't have it". One lady even asked for my phone number twice during the same five minutes conversation. At the end of the two weeks, I finally got a call from a poor man from the courier service. His first question was who I was and the second what I wanted. The third question was which tracking number I had. He had apparently been asked to solve a problem with a missing package without anyone telling him which package it was. Or even that it was missing.
One of the most renowned business magazines in the world, once paid me to have a subscription. Basically they screwed up the credit card invoice, charging me too much, and it took me lots of phone calls during six months to make them correct the mistake. In the end they credited the difference twice, thereby giving me more back than I paid in the first place. I do not have any bad conscience that I didn't spend another six months trying to make them correct the second mistake.
Those are just some examples of sheer incompetence at companies, who still can be said to offer a service top-class, because the other ones are even worse.
I don't want to recommend anyone to cultivate his own stupidity in order to become rich and powerful. It may of course work, but stupidity is not a sufficient property to succeed in life. There are a lot of stupid people, who unfortunately fail in using this weapon in the right way, and being poor and stupid is not a pleasant combination. No, try to be intelligent, dear children, because even if you won't reach the top, it's usually more fun to be bright than clueless. Besides, if you're intelligent and behave intelligently, you will be less competition for me, when I try to climb the ladder to the top.
20 March 1999
by Magnus Lewan