Interesting + Uplifting

I was reading some of Eric's book today "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell and parts of the reading caught my attention [this will be some good news for other archies]. A couple chapters of the book are titled "The Trouble with Geniuses" and they discuss how having a high IQ doesn't necessarily correlate to being a genius. I have always wondered about this concept because I knew a lot of very intelligent people in my high school, but at the same time realized how diverse my understanding of "intelligence" was. There were the people in my high school who were text-book smart and in any subject where they could memorize answers they excelled and were definitely put on a pedestal for their skills. I also knew some people who were analytically smart and could decifer things that weren't on the surface of a topic or subject matter [I always thought these people were some of the smartest]. Then, there were people who for some reason did "OK" in classes and scored extremely high on their SAT's... I didn't understand it at the time as those people being necessarily geniues [for some I actually thought genius was a far-fetched word to describe them], but I guess in their own right - their minds were intelligently working in that one specific direction.

This summer I got to work with some people who didn't even go to college and instead were working remedial jobs - but the things they said were more intelligent than the things I would overhear some of my friends saying in high school. There were other people I knew like this growing up - and I guess I would refer to them as having some sense of "street-smarts" and a logic derived more from experiences than from books [this is the other "type" of person I find more closely related to a "genius"]. These people - from merely living have developed ways of thinking to grow and adapt to their environment and their experiences - and this is where Gladwell's book takes off. He examines peoples' backgrounds and shows how many people share similar life-stories based on how they grew up. I guess this is a bunch of somewhat-interesting rambing though considering what caught the most of my attention.

In part of the book - he says to list as many things as you can to describe the next two words:

1- a brick
2- a blanket

He then shows the responses of a couple students and delineates how the genius of answers to such open-ended questions can bring out the "genius" of a working brain. It also shows how people with similar, high IQ scores can differ when it comes to creativity. I think architecture school searches a lot for this kind of rarity in our projects - to find not the "book-smart" genius... or necessarily the "analytical" genius, but more of the person who can adapt and explore according to what is being asked - kind of like the creative people I met working over the summer [who I really didn't get into talking about... but maybe you have an idea in your head which will work just fine]. I guess this is somewhat of a caveat for me because I think a lot of times in high school I fell into the "book-smart" category and ever since architecture school I have been trying to unlearn my way of learning to try and make myself more like a true architectural-thinker. It's proven to be a difficult process and I continue to be more and more frustrated over it, but maybe finding more readings like this will inspire me and lead me to a new direction of how to think about my own thinking. haha - okay this has probably gotten really confusing by now because I'm only paying about 1/3 attention to writing this - I'm watching a psychology tv show I found off Gladwell's website and also watching another dumb mtv show. Soooo maybe this inspires other people, too? I hope so and I'll try paying more atttention to what I'm writing in the future [even though it's not usually in my capacity to concentrate on one thing at a time].

-c