Smart people get annoyed like the rest of us, but the difference is that they don’t have some of the most common complaints.
Declaring a job too simple
Complaining about how a task is ‘beneath you’ is kind of strange. No matter how much you complain, the job still needs doing. Simple tasks aren’t pointless or intellectually meaningless because they’re simple. Intelligent people really understand that.
Yes, surprisingly, they’re usually quite intellectually humble, and they see simple tasks as what they are. They’re simple tasks. They’re not a measure of intelligence. So, smart people aren’t going to complain about having to do them.Â
Getting impatient with a careful answer
It never goes down well when someone complains about another person taking too long to make a careful decision. Some decisions have more moving parts, after all. Rushing them is probably going to cause you to miss something important.
Intelligent people understand that time pressure is useless. They won’t complain about the lack of an instant answer because, really, a fast answer isn’t necessarily a good answer.
Waiting for someone else to lead
Most people aren’t going to hand you a checklist in life, and that’s okay. It might slow things down a little, but it doesn’t mean everything has to stop, and smarter people know that. They’re not going to complain that nobody gave them any instructions.
No, they’ll figure out their next move from the information already sitting in front of them. They test something and notice what happened, then they change course if they need to. Put it this way, they’re not going to complain about not getting exact instructions. They’ll just figure it out.
Missing the old way
Whenever a new system shows up, you can guarantee that everyone misses the old one. But intelligent people aren’t going to sit and complain about how they liked things better before. They’re way more flexible than that.
Conditions change, and they avoid acting like familiarity is proof that something’s better. The replacement could be worse, sure, but it could also be better. Smart people will take the time to test it out before declaring that everything’s a disaster.
Asking what the point is
There are some people who complain about learning when they can’t see its immediate practical value. You won’t find smart people acting that way, though. They’re far more curious and capable than that, so they’ll pick things up long before they know how they’ll be useful.
The payoff might turn up years later, or maybe it never does. That doesn’t matter. The learning was still interesting for them, and smart people care more about that than the actual payoff. Learning for the sake of learning is totally okay.
Writing something off after one miss
One try went badly, but that doesn’t mean the whole method is useless. Thinking that way involves making a big leap from a very small sample, and smarter thinkers avoid that entirely. They’re generally more comfortable with treating failure as information. It’s not a final ruling.
It could be that the method was poor, or maybe that the timing was off. Maybe they used it badly the first time. The reason itself doesn’t matter, but the way intelligent people approach the issue does. They’re more likely to keep working after an early failure, instead of complaining that the whole thing is dead.
Putting every misunderstanding on the listener
It’s way too easy to say that someone didn’t get what you meant. You can just complain that someone misunderstood you, rather than considering that the message was unclear. Intelligent people won’t do that.
They know that people are famously bad at judging how clearly their own thoughts come across. They’re not going to complain that the listener missed something obvious. Instead, they’ll reword it and add context, maybe even ask what the other person heard.
Letting a bad streak become everything
We all know someone who has a bad Monday and makes it into a bad week. It then becomes a complaint about how ‘nothing ever works.’ While it might feel natural to turn several issues into a sweeping complaint about everything, that doesn’t make it right.
More intelligent people are able to recognize that. They’ll keep the size of the conclusion close to the size of the sample. In other words, three setbacks are three setbacks, nothing more. That doesn’t make the setbacks go away, but it also stops one complaint from becoming a hundred.
Treating a changed mind as a flaw
It’s perfectly fine to change your mind after getting new information, yet some people don’t think so. They’ll complain and complain about it. Not intelligent people, though, they’re a lot less bothered by someone changing an opinion for a good reason.
They actually encourage it. Yes, they’re more likely to reconsider their views when they come across better evidence. These people aren’t going to complain about someone else doing the same.
Demanding a solution that works everywhere
One solution might work nine times and then fail once. Non-intelligent people will declare the whole thing useless, while intelligent people are more likely to ask what changed in that tenth case. They know that different problems call for different methods.
They’ll adjust their strategies when the situation changes, rather than assuming the same method will keep working for them. The truth is, not every great idea is useful in every scenario. There’s really no point in complaining about that.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
