What is your smartness score?

[Epicenter]

I mean your subjective one. Let us say the average is 100.

Give examples of smartness.

• Lateral thinking - The ability to think about some subject and then switch gears effortlessly into some other subject and keep them tied together in some way. This can lead to some ambling conversations but that's always fascinating.
• If we say smart as in creative some of the folks I've worked with will in a conversation work through the pros and cons, and explore (or be able to explore) ideas in some depth with just the conversation, as opposed to doing "next steps" they dive right in and want to get to something cool, and they can do so beyond some bull**** surface level conversation. This is AMAZING when you take a smart person from another field and explain your problem to them , often-times they will have some tried and true method that they can offer up that's novel to you because your discipline / experience is sufficiently different from theirs. If we talk about real nuggets of gold, this would be among them.
• Not usually very assertive on sometimes their area(s) of expertise, I can't tell you how many times I've worked with super-smart people who know some subject matter cold, and will let some lesser opinion take hold because they didn't assert themselves. I've seen people leave firms rather than have to "deal" with some bad manager or co-worker who had less good ideas but who is more vocal about then.
• So often really smart people will take some non-trivial measure of joy in work which most other people find ridiculously boring or tedious.

Edit 1

I was just talking with my wife about my CEO and how he shares a trait with my uncle, who is also a CEO. It’s one I’ve observed with a lot of smart and successful leaders.

The common trait is that that whenever I speak with them, they make me feel really smart. They genuinely come off like they learned something from me. It makes me feel good.

It’s a hell of a skill.

We were discussing if it’s something that can be learned and practiced.

From what I can tell it’s about being honest about what you don’t know, realizing when someone may know more about something, asking a lot of good questions, and expressing gratitude that the other person shared their knowledge with you.