If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room

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We are indebted to Marissa Mayer for this golden nugget of wisdom: If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room

At first blush it seems rather appealing. Only when you reflect on the downward spiral into oblivion it incites, does its true horror becomes plain. If — as it may, for it does explain a few things — this reveals a true fact about the world, it is a distressing one. No one emerges with much hope, or credit:

Firstly, and obviously, it is quite bad news for clever people, who must as a result continually absent themselves from rooms they were probably enjoying being in. But it is hardly better for the great, face-slapping mediocrity, for it will make our lives harder too. Is it any wonder that we are all so confused? At least one person in every room is in the wrong place.

At least; most likely it is more: Nobel laureates have no monopoly on room dysphoria. To the contrary, the stupider you are, the more likely you are to be in the wrong room.

This news will also be disappointing for teachers, implying as it does that they are all constantly in the wrong room: either by being too smart — per Mayer’s Law — or not being smart enough, it being a founding proposition that one should not educate people who are already cleverer than you are.

It also means lavatory cubicles are just wrong, on principle.

I have just had an argument with my daughter about who should leave the kitchen. Eventually we agreed she should go. But, dilemma! The minute she left I became the smartest person in the kitchen, so I had to leave too. I joined her in the laundry.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING, DAD?" she is yelling at me. "Now I have to leave the laundry, too."

Firstly, being the stupider one I don’t see how I was meant to know this? Secondly, I don't think she was allowed in there by herself in the first place, but her presence at least gave me some cover.

But as soon as she left I had to leave as well.

Just when this was getting really annoying for both of us, traipsing around the house, going in and out of all the rooms, we worked out what to do. (It was my daughter’s idea: she’s the smart one.)

Finally, we can sit down. As luck would have it, it is quite a mild evening for December, though it looks like it might rain.

But I need the loo.

See also

• Paradox