The Difference Between Smart People and Everyone Else
Having a high IQ doesn’t make you smart. Moreover, the difference between someone with a high IQ who is smart and someone with a high IQ who is not smart is the same difference between smart people and everyone else. That is, smart people are not smart because of what they think, but because of how they think about what they think.
In other words, smart people are smart because of metacognition. Metacognition is when you think about how you think and then use what you learn to improve your thinking. Moreover, the application of metacognition comes from how smart people orient their mindset.
The Mindset of Smart People
This mindset that makes someone appear smart is what Patricia Chen, Ph.D., a social psychology professor, identifies as the strategic mindset. The strategic mindset is a mindset in which one focuses on using self-awareness as part of the process to get an outcome. Moreover, this process of self-awareness nearly always leads to the right answer, even when the first iteration of the process leads to the wrong answer. The reason for this is because those who develop a strategic mindset learn how to master two steps:
- Recognizing how their thinking and behaviors can be improved using metacognition questions
- Acting on this recognition
In short, smart people don’t have bigger brains than anyone else. Rather, they just work harder than everyone else developing their mindset to learn from and apply the learning from their experiences. This means that anyone can be smart if they train their minds to apply self-awareness to how they learn and behave. Furthermore, you don’t need a high IQ to do this.