Average, penniless, monogamous, misanthropist

It has been said that we gauge our own intelligence by the intelligence of our peer group. We might have the impression that we are incredibly clever but that could simply be because those we associate with ain’t too bright. We can never truly know how smart we are because maybe we have never known a truly smart person.

But how would we even recognise one? Not every clever person carries on like Tony Stark (genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist). How can we be sure that the people we think are clever, though not quite as clever as ourselves, actually are? And what does clever even mean? Is clever purely intellectual? Should I get all my friends to sit an IQ test? Does being really good at sport count, because my mum is a genius at badminton, well better than me.

Which raises another question, how much better than everyone else does a truly smart person have to be? I am only too aware that the difference between being very good at something and being brilliant can be agonisingly small. I was once really clever at drawing freehand circles but my friend Graham Flood was uncanny, perfect circle after perfect circle. I began to suspect he was using a sly compass, checked every circle for a tell tale pinprick but no. He was just better at it than me. Not sure how useful a skill it was though, I would be surprised if he’d made a lucrative career out of it but it does show that thinking you are good at something is not nearly enough. Deeds then.

How many smart people would you need to build an iphone? I mean from scratch. I suspect a lot. You can be sure that there isn’t a single person who could claim to know how to do it. You would need hundreds, Jony Ive couldn’t, all he did was a quick sketch on the back of a napkin. ‘Make it look like that’, he told a group of very but less clever people. And they did. I don’t think I would feel too good about myself in their company, but then again, being specialists, maybe they are only good at one thing. Perhaps they would get pummelled by a posse of polymath plumbers in a pub quiz. So does that mean that truly clever people excel at everything ? And will that help me identify them. Not necessarily.

When I was at school there was a kid who was the very devil at chess, he could thrash everyone in chess club, could play half a dozen of us at once and never lose. Anyone who got to know him thought he was a prodigy but not many did because away from chess he could barely put a sentence together, always wore his cap and his Mother tied his shoe laces.

I had a friend from college whose general knowledge was astounding, any question we asked she would provide an effortless answer. She was confident, funny and modest, this was someone who genuinely seemed to know and have it all. We thought she was the very best of us until she sat her A levels, failed the lot.

I know a neurologist, his name is Brian, which is an anagram of brain, how cool is that? That man paddled in my shallows, waded out into my depths, told me things about my mind that were hard to imagine. And yet. He has the handwriting of a eight year old and can’t spell anything with more than two syllables.

One thing I know for certain is that these are all really smart people, just not at everything. The chess player may have been socially inept but who cares when he won every game of chess he played, the college friend was a genius just rubbish at exams and the neurologist can diagnose idiopathic, intracranial hypertension from a conversation, he just can’t spell it.

None of them would seem that clever though without the cleverness of other people. Individual human brilliance may provide a light source but it requires the lenses of association and context to focus it. Perhaps we shouldn’t compare our supposed intellect to those around us but accept that it is their intelligence that defines our own, for better or for worse.

I still associate with partially brilliant people, people who are all incompletely brilliant but in very specific ways. Together we make a functioning whole. Despite the coruscating company I keep I am perfectly happy to admit that I am not as clever as I think I am. But then again, no one is as clever as I think I am.