If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room
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We are indebted to Confucius, or Jack Welch, or 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 it incites does its counsel of oblivion become plain. For if “Mayer’s Law” reveals — as it may, for that would explain a few things — true facts about the world, they are chastening ones.
Clever people: It is bad news for brain-boxes, who must now continually absent themselves from rooms they probably quite enjoy being in.
All rooms are problematic: But braininess, here, is relative, so you don’t need to that much of a brainbox to have to get your coat. It follows that at least one person in every room in the world is in the wrong place. Since a good portion of the world’s rooms only have one occupant in the first place, we quickly reach a limit condition.
Stupid people: It is no little better for the great, face-slapping mediocrity. Those who are relatively, as well as absolutely, stupid — and trust me, our lives are hard enough as it is — must also deal with an insidious brain drain should two or three of us be gathered together. And remember, not only brainy people are prone to disorientation. They should, as a rule, be less prone to disorientation than the pea-brained. . So, those with no real reason to rejoice in this observation include:
Teachers: This news will also be disappointing for teachers, implying as it does that none of them are where they should be: they disqualify themselves from their surroundings either by being too smart — per Mayer’s Law — or not being smart enough, it being a founding proposition that you should not educate people who are already cleverer than you are.
Lavatories: It also means lavatory cubicles, phone booths and small apartments are just wrong, on principle.[1]
O! Paradox: It gets worse. If we take it that those who find themselves in the wrong room should get out of it, we can deduce that no room on the planet has a stable equilibrium. Occupancy tends quickly to zero. I have just had an argument with my daughter Antagonista Contrariana 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 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.”
Being the stupider one, I don’t see how I was meant to know this? Plus, I don't think she should have gone 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.
Not sure what we will do when someone needs the loo.
See also
References
- ↑ There may be an exception for those high tech self-flushing ones you find in Japan, for uncommonly dull people.