The 80th-floor Genius: Steve Jobs’ Definition of High Intelligence and more
4 new ideas on smarter living
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The 80th-floor Genius: Steve Jobs’ Definition of High Intelligence
High intelligence is a skill.
It makes you a better person because you will be able to see almost everything from different perspectives. Jeff Bezos says you can maximise your genius potential by improving your ability to change your mind when you find better knowledge.
Elon Musk says, “It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree.”
Steve Jobs definition is also completely different.
His definition of “smart” is about increasing your experiences and making better connections from a different perspective when the time is right.
In this video, a speech to the Academy of Achievement June 1982, Jobs explains the signs of high intelligence:
“A lot of [what it means to be smart] is the ability to zoom out, like you’re in a city and you could look at the whole thing from the 80th floor down at the city. And while other people are trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B reading these stupid little maps, you could just see it in front of you. You can see the whole thing.”
Most people use the same lens when pondering ideas. If you examine things from a completely different perspective, what you will find will surprise you.
The 80th-floor intelligence is like improving your “bird’s eye view” skills.First, you have to learn how to learn deeper and broader to accumulate experience and better knowledge.
You can only make better connections if you already have the right knowledge. So to improve your intelligence, gather more insight from great sources, choose your knowledge sources wisely, learn from people more intelligent than you, and read books you are willing to reread repeatedly.
“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest,” Confucius once said.
Improving your intelligence is about stacking experience and applying lessons from good sources.You can only zoom out if you know what you are looking at. It’s hard, but it’s worth it.
Jobs continues:
“You have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does, or else you’re gonna make the same connections and you won’t be innovative. […] You might want to think about going to Paris and being a poet for a few years. Or you might want to go to a third-world country — I’d highly advise that. Falling in love with two people at once. Walt Disney took LSD, do you know that?”
Great brains are open to multiple sources of knowledge. Think Leonardo da Vinci. He was a polymath and mastered dozens of topics.
“To develop a complete mind: Study the science of art; Study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else,” da Vinci once said.
Openness to wide and deep experiences outside your comfort zone will change your life. It will also improve your thinking lens.
Intellectual curiosity is key to peak intelligence. It’s also one of the best predictors of success. Curiosity is at the core of scientific discoveries.
Many of history’s great minds share this trait, from artists to scientists to inventors. Your ability to spot better life and career patterns, make more brilliant connections and predict good outcomes depend on your ability to pause, zoom out and visualize the bigger picture. “Learning never exhausts the mind,” Leonardo da Vinci said. Do more for your mind — your best future self depends on it.
Food for thought
How to be enough [Vox]
“The instinct to improve our circumstances is a functional one in a society where resources are scarce. The problem arises when those who objectively already have enough — and ample time and money — are constantly marketed endless goods and opportunities. Then, habituation and comparison fuels unhappiness, Dubey says. Having enough money to cover necessities and conveniences is shown to make people happy, research shows, but earning much beyond that may be detrimental to life satisfaction. “People can go from miserable to fine fairly easily,” Mastroianni says. “It’s going from fine to great that gets really hard.”
Where All the Time Went [Raptitude]
“The reason time seems to speed up over the years is that novelty naturally declines as we age. Life’s elements become increasingly familiar and routinized. You take fewer risks, become less adventurous, move house less often, change jobs less, meet fewer people, stay home more, and so on. You can probably see where I’m going with this. When the pandemic emergency was declared, we were at first catapulted into the unfamiliar. Over only a few weeks, we had to adopt all new ways of living, working, socializing, sanitizing, entertaining ourselves, and thinking about the world. That few weeks felt very long and was very memorable. This is what happens when novelty spikes.”
4 ideas on smarter living
A holistic approach to life
“The good news is that neither work nor leisure time must satisfy all your psychological needs. Instead, each role in life you have (eg, experienced foreman, loving husband, caring son, dedicated Red Cross volunteer and avid chess player) plays an important part in an orchestra. Coordination of these different roles, and satisfaction of needs via active engagement in these roles, results in what we call ‘life domain harmony’ – the symphony of your life.”—Source
A reading habit that helps me read more books
It’s one thing to quit reading a book and feel bad about it. It’s another to quit a book and feel proud of it. All you have to do is change your mindset. Don’t be afraid to break up with a book if it doesn’t spark joy, no matter how little or much you’ve already read. I quit three or four books for every book I read to the end. I do the ‘first five pages test’ before I buy any book (checking for tone, pace, and language) and then let myself off the hook if I need to stop halfway through.
Morgan Housel on money decisions
“Money – investing, personal finance, and business decisions – is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together.” — Source
Nat Eliason on integrating the many “functions” of your life
“Instead of looking at some problem like “I don’t see enough friends,” or “I don’t work out enough,” or “I don’t have enough fun,” and then trying to find time to fit those priorities into, we should see how we can incorporate them into what we’re already doing. Could you make your workout less perfectly optimized so you can do it with friends? Can you loosen the reigns on your Super Duper Productive Routine to hang at a coffee shop with friends for a few hours a week? And for the love of God, can you please stop drinking fucking Huel or Soylent at your desk and talk to someone instead.” Source
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Thanks for reading!
Until next week,
Thomas
Medium | Thinking Toolbox | The Write Life | How to Live: Lessons in Stoicism
Postanly Weekly is now a reader-supported publication. To support my work, you can upgrade to a paid subscription for $7 per month or $40 for an entire year. 50% off today. With a modest yearly contribution you’re not only helping keep Postanly Weekly going, you also get free access to Thinking Toolbox (mental models for life) and Mental Wealth Toolbox (practical concepts for smarter decisions).
All these great thinkers are Intuitive Thinkers, including you Thomas. Intuitive Thinkers are a small percentage of the population and those who do not have this personality type are not likely to have 80th-floor perspective abilities, see that everything is connected, etc.