By SAM DICHIARA
OPINION —
There is a famous quote that goes, “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by how well it can climb a tree, it will spend its whole life thinking it’s an idiot.”
The quote is almost always attributed to Albert Einstein. But he didn’t say it.
In fact, historians don’t know who said it, but they’re pretty sure it was not Einstein. Similar phrasings have floated around since at least the 1800s.
But this and at least five other famous quotes you’d probably recognize are falsely credited to Einstein. Why? I think it’s because we believe something is truer when someone smart says it. That often seems logical to us, but it isn’t.
What we call intelligence is an extremely specific set of cognitive skills that lend themselves to an extremely specific way of understanding the world that is no better or worse than any other. Plato was brilliant when it came to philosophy. Newton was a mathematical genius.
But what about someone who always seems aware of how they and others are feeling, who can intuitively understand the mindset someone else is in, and attune themselves to that? That person is socially and emotionally intelligent. What about the athlete who has a deep understanding of how his/her body manages to perform, and how the muscles tend to move and feel when she/he swings a bat or shoots a basketball? What about the musician with an intimate understanding of how a violin responds when a bow is drawn across the strings?
IQ does not test for these types of intelligence. Neither does the ACT or the SAT. Several studies have demonstrated that IQ is an awful predictor of academic and professional success. Research consistently shows that excellence has much more to do with things like emotional intelligence, interpersonal communication and strong, supportive relationships with loved ones.
So Einstein really was profoundly brilliant, but no more than you are. His type of genius is related to what our culture teaches us to idolize and prioritize over others: scientific and technological progress.
Scientific discovery is great, but no greater than the types of intelligence that might discover for the world how people can better understand themselves and each other — how we can learn to cooperate rather than compete and how we can achieve peace among nations for the sake of everyone’s prosperity.
We have to ask ourselves how to build a society that makes the most of what everyone brings to the table, so we can become as wise as we are smart. Many of the world’s problems today stem from the fact that we keep developing new technologies faster than we can figure out how to use them responsibly.
Civilization can’t survive much longer if technical know-how keeps outrunning wisdom. Every one of us lives in a world less awesome than it could be because we elevate one kind of brilliance over all others, and therefore make only one kind of progress. We are hemorrhaging human potential.
At night, we look up at the sky and see all the stars and the constellations, and each glittering bulb in the whole web of lights is beautiful. And then the sun comes up. It’s a star just like all the others, except it’s closer; so it’s so bright that we can’t see the others at all. The irony is that we think we can see things better during the day.