Common Sense?

“Knowledge of a boy’s IQ is of little help if you are faced with a formful of clever boys.”

- Louis Terman, by way of Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell attempts to define what contributes to making a person uber-successful. Chance has a lot to do with it; for example if your birthday is right after the cut-off date for sports or school, and you are the oldest on your team or in your grade, you have a better chance of being labeled as talented, and therefore will be groomed as talented and therefore will be more successful. Another is practice. Any person who is considered an expert in their field generally has put at least 10,000 hard hours into whatever it is they do. People who have the opportunity and inclination to put in the hours are more successful.

Another is divergent thinking.

Gladwell asserts that once a person gets to an IQ of about 120, additional IQ points do not help that person nearly as much as other factors, such as divergent thinking. A divergent thinker is one who thinks outside the box. When you ask such a person to list things they could do with a brick, they says things like, “to use in a game of Russian roulette if you want to keep fit at the same time (bricks at ten paces, turn and throw – no evasive action allowed)” (Outliers pg. 87). A convergent thinker’s list only includes traditional uses, such as building a house.

All my life, I’ve heard people say things like, “He’s smart, but he doesn’t have any common sense.” Or, “I’m not book smart; I’m street smart.” I never was one to have much common sense and I always thought of this as some sort of deficit. I’m intelligent (“book smart”), but really, I don’t have a ton of common sense. I’ve gotten more “street smart” as I’ve gotten older. But even now, sometimes I will ask a question and get a look that says, “Are you an idiot?”

I finally figured it out today. I was at Wal-Mart and the cashier picked up my reusable shopping bags and asked, “Do you want me to put your stuff in here?” I’m not a rude person in general, so I just said, “Yes,” in a non-sarcastic voice. But what I was thinking was, “Of all the things that you could possibly do with those bags, which would seem the most logical at this point? There really is only one answer.” Then I started to think of all the things one could possibly do with a reusable shopping bag (a la the brick test) and it occurred to me that “dumb questions” may actually be “smart questions.”

I don’t know if this cashier is a divergent thinker or not, but my theory is that divergent thinkers’ minds are open so wide that there are many possibilities that do not exist for the convergent thinker. When they ask a question that sounds really stupid, it is because of all those possibilities that do not exist for the close-minded person. It’s not a deficit at all.

So when someone asks you a “dumb question,” instead of congratulating yourself for having too much common sense to pose such a query, perhaps you should be a little bit embarrassed that you have so much.