When I was younger it was cliché to say (or at least think) that smart people had issues. There were sayings such as “A students teach B students to work for C students”, or that some people were “be book smart, but not street smart”. It wasn’t hard to finally internalize the message, and accept that being smart, or at least book smart, wasn’t such a great thing after all.

Initially, I thought it was just a phase, and that sometime in the future, when everybody was all grown up, people would change their minds, and begin to recognize (book) smart people amongst them for what they are worth. However, that utopia has never materialized. I still hear such platitudes as those above quite often, and I see many other things happening, which I find interesting.

I recently attended a commencement ceremony at a school of Mathematics, where, interestingly, the guest speaker was a businessman. During the commencement address, the said speaker strongly urged the graduating class “not to remain locked up in the world of science”, but to “use their minds to become businessmen and make lots of money”. Not that I have any problem with scientists becoming entrepreneurs or anything, but I find that he voiced many of the same concerns I heard about the ‘nerd’ while growing up.

Their friends and family admire them for their impressive minds, but cringe over the thought they have no social skills or are ‘doomed’ to lives as ‘poor scholars’ (where scholar here refers to a university teacher or scientist locked up in some lab). Those who feel particularly intimidated by them wait for that future in which they are dirt poor, slaving away at the service of some C student; where their brains are not sufficient to put food on their tables. The underlying assumption was that the scholar is inferior to the businessman, or the actress because he supposedly earns less, or is less popular.

Consequently, most of the very smart people I knew in my youth struggled very hard to hide their love of learning (there seems to be a very strong correlation between being book smart and enjoying the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake), in a bid to gain social approval, or at least, not appear so smart and nerdy.

The current assumptions, especially in Africa, are that these smart people will only reach their full potential if they became businessmen of some sorts, and that everybody wants to be tremendously rich [^1].

I think the second assumption is false. While everybody I know would agree that it doesn’t hurt to have plenty of money, the smart people I know have a slightly different set of priorities. Before being rich, they want to be smart. They want to be great at mathematics, or excellent writers, or rigorous thinkers. They want to understand how things work, before asking how much they can be sold for. As such, while people look at them with the air of pity/disgust over the apparent waste of their potential, they do not understand that they are doing what they love, and that, for the most part, they find fulfillment in what they are doing.

Now, on to the next assumption: smart people will only reach their potential if they make more money. Well, that’s a big claim to make, given that it presupposes knowledge of what that potential is, in the first place, and what should be done to reach that potential. Secondly, it is false. Einstein was not any less of a physicist for lack of money, and there is no evidence to support the assertion that he would have been a better scientist if he had more money. True, money is required to fund scientific research, but those scientists do not need to be Bill Gates in order to push science to the next level.

Which brings me to the third point: A students no longer work for C students. At least in some parts of the world. Microsoft. Facebook. Google. Research In Motion. Tesla. Just a short list of companies, who run the world, and are run by smart people. Interestingly, they end up hiring their likes. So, now, we have A students working for other A students. I don’t know if that is the utopia that was hoped for by those who came up with the ‘A students worked for C students’ sayings or not, but, from where I stand, things will not change anytime soon.

It wouldn’t surprise me, if, after reading this, you came to the conclusions that this was cathartic writing. The author must be a nerd, and is trying to justify his poverty level, or tell himself that the abuse he suffered as a kid was for a purpose. Well, short answer: that is far from the truth. While I have never thought of myself as being particularly bright, I have never been accused of being particularly stupid either. So, on most scales, I should fit somewhere in the middle, alongside most of the population.

Why then, did I write this? Well, because I have quite a few smart (and nerdy) friends, and I think it would be great, for everybody’s sake, if they remained that way.

Notes:

[^1] I think this a reaction from recent cultural trends in Africa. Until a few years ago, there was a huge emphasis on higher education. Everybody believed that the only way to achieve anything in life was to become a professor. To be fair, in some parts of Africa, that is still the case. That that thinking was wrong does not justify shifting to the other extreme of the spectrum.