Have You Ever Met A Very Intelligent Person Who Had No Clue As To How Smart They Were? (r/AskReddit)

have you ever met a really intelligent person who didn't really know how smart they were what was your experience with them we have a paid summer internship program for juniors and seniors pursuing construction management degrees five years ago we had a young woman who came into the program in her junior year she was very tiny in stature and very quiet but we soon learned giant in intellect and loud where it counted the way we operate is each in turn will spend three weeks on a different project learning a different role within the organization three weeks on site as a superintendent in turn three weeks on site with safety three with project management and three on site with quality control after each period i received a call praising her ingenuity and ability to adapt and improvise in any situation at the end of the internship we have a plus delta review of their performance and based on that review we make a determination on whether to offer them a place the following summer in the case of a senior we determine if we want to extend them a full-time employment offer every review she received from each department all said the same thing hire her now we extended an offer for a salaried position part-time from that point through her senior year along with tuition reimbursement this young lady still amazes everyone every single day she's 25 years old making an amazing salary and absolutely dominating any projects she's given if she doesn't know it today she'll practically be an expert tomorrow she's incredibly impressive i can see her having my job one day operations director hopefully it's after i retire criminal defense lawyer here had a client who was a low-level drug dealer and gun runner most street level guys have a very different type of intelligence that doesn't translate well to the white collar world many of my clients ask to read case law i've only met one who could read it digest it and discuss it intelligently with me this guy he'd do his own research from the jail which isn't uncommon but this guy did it well and would actually send me relevant cases that were helpful to the issues in his case and when i explained to him why some were not helpful he got it asked good questions and used that discussion to inform future research there are a lot of inmates who consider themselves jailhouse lawyers this guy was smart enough to actually be one i think about him a lot and wonder what his life would have been like if he was fortunate enough to be afforded with the same opportunities during childhood that i enjoyed his guy he'd do his own research from the jail which isn't uncommon but this guy did it well this story is quite sad to read i hope he can meet his potential someday if you want to read a happier version of this story take a look at professor sean hop would add georgetown law the guy from prison and with zero formal legal training pen two petitions for sushiri that were granted by the u.s supreme court just one cert petition being granted is a huge career-making accomplishment for any actual trained attorney so to have a guy who taught himself the law in a prison law library do it twice is absolutely bonkers he has since been released graduated from law school and is now a professor at georgetown i think about him a lot and wonder what his life would have been like if he was fortunate enough to be afforded with the same opportunities during childhood that i enjoyed i've got a phd and work in a field where so many people have phds that they don't even mention them to this day i suspect that the smartest person i've ever met was a kid i taught at a get learning center in the middle of a pretty rough area of a big city i've met plenty of people who were exceptionally smart in one or maybe two dimensions but this guy was across the board he'd turn it on now and then like when we were playing chess and one time when he made a reference to something in french of all things and then he'd just kind of smile like it was enough to just briefly show the rest of us how smart he was it was almost like he was a self-aware will hunting not that cartoonishly smart of course but very very smart aware of it and aware of his station in life i have absolutely no doubt that if he'd had my advantages since birth he'd be a rock star in whatever field he was in but instead i'd see him hanging around a corner store and he may have been a low-level dealer i have no idea what's become of him but i hope it's for the best i taught algebra to inmates briefly and the number of guys who told me they were too stupid to learn math while being able to convert odd measurements between metric and imperial and their heads on the fly was too damn high i'd like to go back in time and kick all those elementary school teachers who told them they were stupid actually i've run into plenty of racist classist elementary school teachers currently teaching but still haven't kicked them even though they deserve it people who are great teachers without actually being a teacher i've always thought people who can teach others are incredibly smart because they are aware enough of what they know to present it to others in such a way they can understand it the guy i used to work with was a phenomenal teacher of all things paints powder coating and color matching blending he had a real passion for it and it showed in the manner in which he taught and demonstrated what he was talking about in saying that he was also very highly strong and had some mental health issues that held him back from doing great things and so believed he was an idiot he wasn't but no amount of telling him would help i was always taught that the best way to learn something is to try and explain teach it to someone else if you can put the concepts into new words to explain it to someone else you will have understood it properly and trying to do so is a great way to embed the knowledge in your mind that was something that was taught in martial arts once you get your black belt that's when the real learning begins it's one thing to copy replicate what your teacher is doing it's another to explain why it works and figure out why what someone else is doing is not working and applied to different physiques my dad grew up believing he was dumb and would never amount to anything his teachers all hated him and the first time he went to university he was kicked out around the same time as i started university my mum finally convinced him to try again to get a higher education himself he's often said that he's too stupid to go back to school but he speaks about six languages fluently has so many new interesting history facts that whenever we watch any movie we always have to pause at least four times for a lengthy discussion about it and he remembers more book quotes than anyone i've ever met he grew up in communist hungary and east germany and he has since then climbed mountains and been scuba diving in the atlantic among a bunch of other adventures whatever the discussion he's got a story to tell he's the coolest dad ever but for as long as i can remember my family has struggled financially since he couldn't get a job that paid enough it makes me so happy that he's finally reaching his full potential now at 51 years old and we're all super proud of him he dreams of being a teacher one day he will the best teacher his future students could ever wish for this is so wholesome even as a stranger i'm proud of your dad i had a kid in my class that never took anything seriously skipped class brought alcohol to class and did numerous other things you name it he probably did it but man that mf knew his whenever he paid attention he understood things when other people were struggling to learn whatever was being taught that day math science english reading etc it makes me a little sad because he was always a troublemaker but deep down i knew that he is was very smart and was capable of doing good in school he just never chose to do it or generally just didn't care right ek at this point i think he got involved with the wrong crowd early on unfortunately in my college dorm we had a kid who took pride on how rarely he was sober he skipped class regularly and just didn't care in general but got perfect scores on practically every test he took so i'm sure he knew he was very intelligent he just didn't know what to do with his intelligence eventually he gave up on drinking ended up triple majoring and still graduated early last i heard he's living happily in a cabin in the woods somewhere sounds like he's winning life former co-worker of mine he came to germany as a refugee in his young teenage years had trouble in school due to language barrier poor support tough family situation typical refugee problems then he was unemployed and job center part of german welfare dealing with unemployment sent him to the security company i worked at that time because conditions of employment are almost non-existent in this field when he was on my team for an event i as team leader had to show him the ropes the event lasted ten consecutive nights and we faced several different challenges that were part of the job every now and then he had a genius idea how to solve the particular problem the following year i got him on my team whenever i could trained him and when i left the company he inherited my position as team leader i don't actually know whether he knew about how smart he is but he was so insecure in the beginning i boldly assume he didn't when i was in uni i took part in a project called inside out where we would go in our prison and have criminology lessons with the inmates whom we called inside students we didn't teach them or observe them we were all learning together and this one guy was just a genius he had this way of describing a phenomenon he'd noticed and thought about without realizing that it was an actual theory that existed like we'd studied them in class so we knew about them but he would just come up with it from personal experience from labeling theory to functionalism he would just outline them like he'd thought of them in the shower it was extraordinary he was also a bit unstable and prone to bursts of anger often towards himself he seemed to become frustrated very easily if he couldn't explain or understand something perfectly and one day he stopped showing up i ended up talking to the guards who told me that he felt like he was too stupid for the class seriously he was convinced that we were all smarter than he was and that he wouldn't be able to keep up i don't know if they ever did but we asked the gods and a few inside students if they could tell him that we'd loved studying with him that he was starting really interesting discussions and that his observations always made us think more deeply that his presence made the class better and just to be clear i don't mean to say that he was smart for someone in prison he was a genius everyone but him knew that he was by far the most intelligent person in the room but he didn't see it i feel like people should be more aware that it's normal to struggle and feel stupid while learning new concepts then they'd be less discouraged and less likely to give up this can be the curse of being highly intelligent never having to put much time or effort into learning something is great until a subject comes along that requires it then all those people who learned how to work hard to understand something keep going and the highly intelligent person has a challenge he she has never seen before and either has to totally change his her study habits life habits in his her late teens or twenties or determined that he she isn't smart enough either way there will be a crisis of confidence and lessons that should have come early come really really late my mother she was raised in a poor abusive family and left school very early to escape even now she'll say how she is uneducated which is true but she ain't stupid she raised a bunch of us without much money and was always resourceful and candy at making ends meet she can do fairly complicated math in her head does extensive research before making large purchases forwards me screenshots of quite sophisticated scam emails and tells me why they are fake she's 78 now and has always embraced new tech has no trouble using her smartphone or her pc she even troubleshoots for her neighbors she still lives in the same poverty-stricken area we grew up in and is often helping her neighbors advocate for themselves writing letters telling them who to contact and what to say she's also a keen observer of humans she sees them as they are and takes them as they are with no judgement she was always progressive for her time and passed down zero racism or other prejudices to us kids i wonder what she could have done if she had the opportunity she made damn sure we had your description is very like my grandma she passed away two years ago at 81 8th grade education which was normal at the time for the area because her parents were farmers at one point she worked a sewing job where they were paid by the piece and grandma worked so fast that they changed the rule and started paying by the hour because she was earning too much money she ran their dairy farm plus corn and soybean fields cattle pigs chickens etc and all the equipment often paying additional hired help grandpa didn't really know how to manage the books so grandma did it all after they retired she had a smartphone before i did she also had a huge 90s desktop computer and printer one time probably about five years or so ago we were playing cards and she pulled out these nice professional looking scoring sheets i thought she must have purchased somewhere nope turns out she made them and figured out how to scan copies i didn't even know she had a scanner when i told her i was surprised she was annoyed at me and was like hey i know how to do stuff i do this and this and this for the neighbors and for this that and the other thing ranting about her computer savvy i had no idea and i was like grandma do you know i'm pretty sure my mom couldn't do some of the stuff you're talking about she also had plenty of stories about identifying and thwarting scammers especially the daughter all kind she liked to smile and waste their time and then when she refused to buy into whatever they were selling and they got angry she would play dumb and offended and laugh about it later she was also progressive in a very heavily conservative area man i miss her my dad he's dyslexic and growing up in the education system in the 70s didn't provide any support so he's all but illiterate he left school at 15 with no qualifications he always says he's stupid and it upsets me so much he won't believe it when we tell him he's not me my mum and my sister all have education beyond degree level and he's smarter than any of us he's eloquent but sometimes mispronounces new words that he's heard in a different accent our accent is heavy on the r sound so i've noticed him adding it to words that don't have ours but of course he's never seen it written down to know he watches historical documentaries and tells us about how that links with the one he watched a couple of years prior he once drove me to university three hours away using the rooted driven in reverse once without checking a map i wish he could see himself as intelligent eater since it seems like a lot of people have a connection with this comment and will enjoy this story he did actually do a speech for my wedding i was worried about asking him because i wasn't sure how he'd manage and didn't want to put pressure on him but he was keen to do it my mum made cue cards with picture hints and they did not help him he just had it written out and learnt it off by heart and used cue cards with the full speech to help him he can read it when he knows what it says and his speech was by far the most confident and well-performed speech out of all of us give him a birthday card with more words than happy birthday and is not happy but he can smash out a full-on speech with no hesitation when you're intelligent you can truly comprehend how stupid you are there's a theory about this right my spouse very intelligent can manage really complex spatial stuff and think through mechanical problems in ways i definitely can't great with computers and pattern recognition and thinking creatively about how to solve problems high school dropout and probably a fifth grade reading level due to severe and inadequately treated dyslexia and dyscalculia i'm a physician and work with many people with less natural processing ability than my spouse has my fiance is very similar ridiculous freehand geometric artist came out of the womb drawing and painting comes to fascinating conclusions at light speed that would take me months to puzzle out gifted classes and such all the way through school until high school when all the classes got boring and the adhd depression finally hit like a freight train tested retested medicated poked and prodded crazy high iq and ended up dropping out of college because everything went so slow he knows he's smart but he can't seem to wrap his head around how other people just don't think the same way he does and i have to scaffold him into understanding that frequently otherwise he gets tangled up in frustration i'm volunteer staff at a math summer camp targeted at children who like doing math most of the kids that we get are the standard doing well in school with good grades to prove it type but it frequently happens that some kid is signed up and the parents tell us that their child doesn't really do well in school in general or math in particular but they just like doing math related puzzles that's cool because that's all we ask for and often enough these kids come with very interesting insights and solutions because they happen to approach the problems from a different angle than the majority they may be quite intelligent but not in a way that expresses itself well within the standard framework of education the same thing happens on the eq social level a few years back we got a sign up where the parents warned us that their son had great difficulties making friends or socializing in general on the first day of camp the kid took a chess board and went to sit down to play against himself perfectly fine but not much later another boy walks up to him and asks if he can join the game they start playing and talking and they end up being practically inseparable the rest of the week the kid that had difficulties making friends just made a new best friend faster than anyone else there just need to give people the right environment it's a lovely story and a nice ending but i gotta admit i thought you were gonna drop some bobby fiesha types there near the end oh mayo same i thought it was gonna be smth like and then he beat him in 30 seconds then he beat me in 30 seconds then he became the world's youngest grams i was pretty good at maths and cooking with a friend who struggled with maths we were doubling a recipe that called for three stroke four cup of flour and i had a mental blank stood there trying to remember 2x 0.75 and my and mathsy friend said i just put 3 stroke 4 of a cup and twice blew my mind i was too academic to think of that solution surely you had to double the amount in your head first in my first year of uni college i sat next to a quiet girl who never thought of herself as smart while everyone else was loud about what they know and act like they are top of the class when they are really not she never showed off her knowledge we just graduated this year fourth year and she was honored the university medal for her thesis number one student in almost 400 students but i bet you she still doesn't think of herself as especially intelligent my grandad left school at 12 he's dyslexic but back in his day that wasn't a recognized thing he has a particular way with animals like he always knows what's wrong can fix anything he's a prolific reader and people just gravitate to him he's the most helpful person you've ever met and will literally go out of his way to help anyone i work in manufacturing so we get a lot of uneducated people there are a lot of people out there who are smart but for various reasons weren't properly served by the public schools they might be barely literate or can hardly string two words together coherently but they solve problems beautifully or always have workable ideas or they talk about ideas rather than people or events it's hard to quantify but you know it when you see it on the flip side i work in a professional white collar job making good money and i know way too many colleagues who are educated but dumb as if it's messed up you know it when you see it educated but dumb as f you can push almost anyone probably 80 percent of the people through school up to the master's degree level with enough resources and determination educational attainment is often more about family background and motivation than intelligence even if someone is well below average if they keep grinding with enough money they'll eventually earn some kind of a bachelor's degree or even a master's albeit often with a few setbacks and not from mit and astrophysics i knew a guy who very smart with the ability to be extremely manipulative and had no idea he always got good grades in school often without studying much at all what was more impressive was his ability to read people's body language vocal tone fluctuation and micro expressions often he would know what emotions someone was feeling and how best to proceed the guy was a master at subtle communication such as mirroring and framing conversations so he would be dominant he was able to use this social intelligence to get with girls but he would also use it to get people to do things he wanted one of the clearest examples of manipulation that i know of is that he got his friend to break up with his longtime girlfriend his friend's girlfriend was kinda a dragon would be a little annoying around the group so he subtly started to slip in emotional and logical suggestions whenever he saw his friend in a moment of emotional vulnerability within a week his friend ended the relationship i no new one of these people once you figure out what they are doing it can be devastating and horrifying my brother everyone used to tell him that he was just average just because he got average grades but this kid is so effing smart he's a huge history buff and one time spent about half an hour explaining to me the importance of some civil war battle and how it was pivotal in helping the union win the war i don't remember the exact details because all i could think about was the level of depth he got into just explaining and analyzing and also explaining in a way that helped me to understand at the time my brother's intelligence is a definition of quality and i'd shout that from the rooftops because as his older sister i'm so effing proud of him i think some people just choose a quieter and more simple life despite their intelligence i worked as a hospital porter for a few years when i was a teen and one of my fellow porters was this brilliant chap who would skim through the paper on his break then go off on some glorious leftist rant like the leader of a union back in the 70s his political knowledge was unbelievable he could easily have been an mp but was happier as a porter [Music] you

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Length: 23min 22sec (1402 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021