Intelligence is hard to define.
In school we’re conditioned to measure intelligence against arbitrary and archaic benchmarks: can I remember this fact, or spell this word, for example.
This creates habits that can become harmful if we don’t unlearn them before adulthood.
It was only in university, and in my first job, where I started to learn that critical thinking, curiosity, flexibility, empathy, persistence, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to synthesise, were better measures of intelligence than fact regurgitation.
But my above list is just a hodgepodge, cobbled-together collection of ideas based on my own experience. It’s by no means a definitive or exhaustive list.
Which is why I really liked this excerpt from Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 book ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid’:
“No one knows where the borderline between non-intelligent behaviour and intelligent behaviour lies; in fact, to suggest that a sharp borderline exists is probably silly. But essential abilities for intelligence are certainly:
- to respond to situations flexibly;
- to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances;
- to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages;
- to recognise the relative importance of different elements of a situation;
- to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them;
- to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them;
- to synthesise new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new ways;
- to come up with ideas which are novel.”
Seeing intelligence as a pattern of behaviours rather than as a defined set of ‘have or don’t have’ skills is a great starting point for self-improvement.