When the subject of intelligence is in question the first thing people may think about is a combination of academic evaluators or maybe some brainy achievement. What if we looked closely at what makes anyone intelligent? What is the commonality among all people that are intelligent? Do these common traits exist at all? Webster says to be intelligent is to have or indicating a high or satisfactory degree of intelligence or mental capacity. Anyone else feel like there has to be more? Should we rely on grades? GPA? What about IQ tests or a high vocabulary? Webster has the additional definition of intelligence as revealing or reflecting good judgement and sound thought.
If we look for a commonality among people that appear intelligent what can we find? I think self-awareness, discipline and expression working together might give us a great start. Good grades.. at times, are the indication and extension of discipline aren’t they? Isn’t it true that you have intelligent people who don’t have good grades? How many disciplined people have bad grades? What are grades? Aren’t they someone else’s ratio of how many you got “right” divided by how many are possible? What does it take? Maybe effort, discipline and organization to name a few things. So it would seem to me that discipline and organization are factors to achieve good grades.
You may be sitting in the presence of intelligence and unique talents, but no one sees it or knows it. However, give them an outlet, a voice or platform and suddenly you discovered it through expression. Expression as an outlet. The great gifts, abilities no one knew you had.
Doesn’t it seem like the people we think are intelligent seem to have high levels of self-awareness? They know who they are, where they have been and most of all where they want to go. These people can tell you how they feel. The elements of self-awareness seem to foster more intelligence with thoughts and actions that lead to even more discovery of who they are.
We may ever arrive at an agreed upon definition of intelligence. I feel that we are off the mark when we only look at grades or even look at achievements to guide us in determining intelligence. I think that everyone is capable of intelligence or more intelligence and learning more. Some of the qualities that enable more intelligence could be self-awareness, discipline and expression. I have heard that reading and writing are indicators of intelligence, don’t they both seem to improve on the three skills I mention above? Maybe Webster was on to something with that printed dictionary.
Dedicated Purpose 