Monthly Archives: December 2005

Innate Smarts Have Never Mattered Less and "Smart" is a Meaningless Word

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Earlier I posted that curiosity quotient matters more than IQ. Recently I traded emails with Chris Yeh and Dave Jilk on this.

Raw intelligence has never mattered less. All the knowledge anyone needs to have is available at your fingertips. Students in India can take MIT classes, for example. Books are scanned and online. Moreover, with billions of capitalists being churned out in the east, hard and smart work will count for far more than raw intelligence. There’s a whole other group of reasons that Daniel Goleman outlines when he succinctly proves that Emotional Intelligence is more important to life success than IQ.

Moreover, I think the word "smart" is the most overused person-description in the entrepreneurial lexicon. It conveys absolutely nothing to me. If you look at LinkedIn profiles, resumes, or blog posts about other people, you will always see "John Doe is super smart" or perhaps even the rarefied word "brilliant," which I thought was reserved for the truly extraordinary but is used so often that it again has lost its meaning.

Most everyone is "smart" in some sense. There are far more precise words that can better convey someone’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses. Articulate? Organized? Empathetic? Thoughtful? Dynamic? Tireless worker?

I think we can assume that any knowledge worker who’s competing has a baseline of general competence, which is what the "smart" catch-all refers to.

Let’s get more precise.

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Dynamically Generating Ads in Podcasts

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Greg Galant of VentureVoice stopped by my school the other day for a quick chat. In addition to his podcasts with venture guys, he’s got a good idea going in RadioTail for inserting  dynamically generated ads into podcasts. Most publishers would "hard code" ads into their shows. This makes a lot more sense.

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The Image Culture

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The New Atlantis has a print-length, excellent article on how our culture is becoming overwhelmingly image based. Its core question: "If we are indeed moving from the era of the printed word to an area dominated by the image, what impact will this have on culture, broadly speaking, and its instituations?"

It is not terribly upbeat, and maybe too cyncial at times, but it is provocative. One thing it puts into words that has always fascinated me is the shrinking space between "life as it is being lived and life as it is being displayed." That is, with digital cameras (and other democratizing technologies) you take a picture and then the child says "Let me see!"

Related Posts: Our Obession Over Memories and Visual Literacy in Business.

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Is the Institution of "Family" Antiquated?

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A friend recently told me: "If you think about it, everything that used to define a family is now gone. They just don’t make sense." I’m sure there are better articles on this than the one below, but it got me thinking….

Link: The Good Enough Family.

In some countries, people still subscribe to ideologies which promote the family as a pillar of society, the basic cell of the national organism, a hothouse in which to breed children for the army, and so on. These collective ideologies call for personal contributions and sacrifices. They have a strong emotional dimension and provide impetus to a host of behavior patterns.

But the emotional investment in today’s individualistic-capitalist ideologies is no smaller than it was in yesterday’s nationalistic ones. True, technological developments rendered past thinking obsolete and dysfunctional but did not quench Man’s thirst for guidance and a worldview.

Still, as technology evolved, it became more and more disruptive to the family. Increased mobility, a decentralization of information sources, the transfers of the traditional functions of the family to societal and private sector establishments, the increased incidence of interpersonal interactions, safer sex with lesser or no consequences – all fostered the disintegration of the traditional, extended and nuclear family.

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Objectivism Continued: Dave Jilk Weighs In

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I’ve exchanged 10 emails over the past two days with David Jilk, CEO of Xaffire. Our topic was Ayn Rand and objectivism, and it started from a detailed comment he left on my post.

At the end, he asked if I was going to update my post to note that I actually did believe in "objective reality" with restrictions. Unfortunately I’m not quite sure what I believe at the moment. It was a fun philosophical exchange that got me thinking in a new way (although admittedly once you start putting quotes around "is" I’m pretty lost!). I figured Dave would be knowledable, but I would have appreciated a heads up beforehand from my friends in Colorado that I was dealing with an extremely well written guy who would start quoting thinkers buried deep in the esoteric domain of philosophy!!

One thing that’s still rattling around in my head is the notion of selflessness – a very bizarre concept if you consider it in terms of our genetic mandate.

Every couple weeks I’ll have a big back and forth via email with someone based on a blog post and it almost always happens in private email. I buy into a lot of the hype around blogs, but I’ve never understood the supposed "conversation" that happens. In my view, trackbacks and comments are a clumsy way to faciliate an e-conversation. Blogs start conversations, but they’re not good enough yet to sustain them. Email is still better. And that’s a shame – because when more voices are heard, we all benefit.

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