Smartness and a high IQ may be admirable qualities, but they only become truly valuable when combined with wisdom. You can read here what characteristics are typical of intelligent people who lack wisdom.
Strictly speaking, intelligence is the quality that enables us to solve the tasks of an IQ test – more or less well. If we have a high level of intelligence, we can, for example, quickly complete logically structured series of numbers correctly without anyone telling us the underlying rule, or recognize one of several words that does not fit the others. And much more.
Those who are very intelligent usually quickly understand the Pythagorean theorem or kinetic energy or the classical structure of a discussion. In addition, this person can usually put information into context well and grasp core aspects of complex contexts.
On the other hand, what does not automatically go hand in hand with high intelligence is wisdom. Wisdom enables us to use not only our intelligence, but also our feelings and instincts to act and live prudently and wisely. Wisdom often grows with experience, i.e. with increasing age, but young people can be wise just as old people don’t have to be.
A person who is very intelligent but not a bit wise often has the following characteristics.
4 characteristics of people who are intelligent but not wise
1. You dismiss other people’s views without considering them.
Smart people often have reasonable opinions that they can justify well and logically. If they lack wisdom in addition to their intelligence, they usually consider this to be the only relevant one. They consider less sensible or less well-founded views to be wrong or at least less valuable and worthy of consideration than perhaps the most intelligent view.
Wise people, in contrast, are equally interested in different perspectives and opinions. They see value in the plurality and individuality of experience and human positions and know that they can learn something from every person, regardless of a person’s IQ, level of education or stance on certain topics. So wise people are generally willing to consider all views, even those that are or seem unreasonable and that they will probably never share.
2. They place statistical values and scientific theories above individual experience.
Smart people are usually curious and interested in reliable data and facts. Therefore, they often know a lot, know statistics and scientific findings on one question or another. They now usually attribute the greatest significance and authority to this knowledge – greater than that of personal experience – if they are intelligent, but not wise.
Wise people classify the significance of research and statistics differently. With a statistical statement like “on average, people in Germany have 1.4 children,” everyone can immediately see that this statistical value does not apply to a single life: Nobody has 1.4 children. Wise people recognize this discrepancy between scientific knowledge and the reality of individual lives, even in less obvious cases – and therefore place greater emphasis on individual experience. They are interested in scientific research, theories, study results and statistics and deal with them. But they are always aware that no study or statistic does justice to every individual case or applies to every person – and that some scientific results and analyzes do not cover anyone and have nothing to do with a single reality of life.
3. They define themselves by their intelligence.
Many smart, not wise people find their intelligence to be an important part of their identity and self-worth. They see their smartness as something that sets them apart and makes them superior as a person to less intelligent people.
Wise people, on the other hand, view intelligence as one of many characteristics a person has – rather than the most important or defining one. They understand that intelligence is a human ability that enables our survival and has shaped our evolutionary history, but that the same applies to skills such as empathy, spreading the thumb, and digesting fruits and nuts. They recognize that this ability varies in different people. But in order to answer the question of who they are, they are far less interested in their intelligence than in what they think, feel and do. And for what they live.
4. They overestimate their skills and miss the big picture.
Intelligent people are very perceptive and can process and structure a lot of information. They often find good solutions to a wide variety of problems and are able to develop expertise in a wide variety of areas. However, if they lack wisdom in addition to their intelligence, they can tend to become so engrossed in their area of interest that they lose sight of the big picture, relevance and relation.
Wise people, whose everyday lives are usually dominated by the feeling that what they are dealing with has absolute meaning, remind themselves from time to time how their work relates to the whole. They remind themselves again and again that the crucial laws that apply to them were not developed by them or any government or employer, but rather stand above all humans and put them on the same level as ladybugs, swallows and hyacinths – because they are all living things affect everyone on this earth equally. They remember that human classifications such as right and wrong or good and bad are necessary guides for us, but may not arise from absolute truth. For this reason, wise people always maintain humility and do not presume to be better or more important than their fellow human beings, a trout or a crow.
Sources used: hackspirit.com, blog.neuronation.com