There Are Different Kinds of Intelligence

I recently had a great conversation with a friend of mine.  She said she'd recently had a breakthrough.  She'd thought her whole life that she wasn't really smart.  She's amazingly successful in her job, has two beautiful children and a solid marriage.  But she thought she wasn't smart all this time.

I was dumb-founded. 

I grew up thinking I was pretty smart, mostly because everyone told me I was.  I was book-smart.  Well, pretty much so, in some areas.  The linguistic areas, mostly.  I'm dumb as a rock at math. 

After college, I took the GMAT.  I thought in order to succeed in business, I had to get a MBA.  However, to my great dismay, though I scored well in the verbal area, I got a 25 in math and logic.  A 25.  I was devastated.  Basically, a chimp could take the test and score as well as I did.  I could've put "C," "C," "C" and gotten the same score as I did TRYING. Trying really, really hard.

Devastated doesn't really describe it.  Not really.  I realized I wasn't as book-smart as I thought I was.

After that, I was very cautious. Because, you know, I was dumb.

Shortly after I took the GMAT, I gave up on the corner office.  I went into public relations, because I've been told I'm good on the phone. In college, my best friend and I worked as telemarketers.  One of our supervisors went on to marry her sister in a weird twist of fate.  Totally unrelated.  But as a telemarketer, I did learn how to close.  I also learned that people, particularly men, appreciate a woman with a Southern accent. My Southern accent is horrible, totally fake, but I guess I could fake it well enough to sell credit cards.

Fast forward four years.  I left Chicago.  I moved to Kansas City.  I moved through a really bad technical recruiting job to have a wonderful man take a chance on me and give me a content management job.  I decided to go back to school and get that writing degree I always wanted.  I told everyone it wouldn't help me in my job. I didn't believe that I could succeed as a writer, because my confidence had been so crushed by my monkey performance on the GMAT.

I was not the best writer in my program.  There was one poet in particular who blew me away with his words.  I have no idea where he is today. I was crushed all over again to learn that I wasn't the smartest, not the best, not the most gifted.  As a matter of fact, I have little natural talent in the area of writing.  I had to study the greats, just like everyone else.  I had to learn form.  I had to learn meter. I had to learn where to put the short sentences, how to remove the clutter, the unnecessary adjectives. After class I would go home and stare at the comments on my stories and articles, listening over and over again to the criticism in my head.  My beloved and family kept asking me why I put myself through it if it was going to crush me so much.

At some point, I realized that it didn't matter if I was the smartest, or the best, or the most creative.  What mattered, what still matters, is how hard I was willing to work at it.

Albert Einstein once said, "It's not that I'm smart, it's just that I stick with problems longer."  He was a very wise man.  That's what my friend was saying when she realized that she's not dumb.  She sticks with problems, too.  So have I.

I'm not some wild writing success, but I have managed to turn my work into what I love to do.  I really do love writing.  It makes me feel more alive than doing anything else I can do professionally. It keeps me grounded in the me that was me before I met my beloved, before the little angel existed.  Certainly these roles of wife and mother fulfill me - I wouldn't be who I am without them - but every person, every woman needs to feel alive because of something only she can do for herself.

We need to fulfill ourselves.  Happiness is knowing you can give that gift to yourself.

Recently new research revealed there is more than one form of intelligence.  To date, there are seven.

1. Linguistic
2. Logical/mathematical
3. Bodily/kinesthetic
4. Spatial
5. Musical
6. Interpersonal
7. Intrapersonal

Make sure you tell your children there is more than one way to be smart.  And even if you're not smart, not in any of those seven ways, you can overcome a lot just by staying with those problems longer.