If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room
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We are indebted to Confucius, Jack Welch, or Marissa Mayer, to one of whom — the smartest? — the internet attributes 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: we should constantly strive: never satisfied with our own size, being relative, as it is, to the pond in which we swim.
Only when you reflect on the downward spiral this aphorism incites does its counsel of oblivion become plain. For if “Mayer’s Law” reveals true facts about the world — as it may, for that would explain a few things — they are chastening ones for a few constituencies:
Clever people: It is bad news for brain-boxes, who must now continually absent themselves from rooms they probably quite enjoy being in. But braininess, here as elsewhere, is relative: you needn’t be that much of a brainbox to have to get your coat. For it follows that at least one person in every occupied room in the world is in the wrong place. Now, since a good portion of the world’s rooms only have one occupant, this is a manifesto for perpetual disruption.
Stupid people: It is little better for we of the great, face-slapping mediocrity. Even if we do manage to make our own way to the right room, by some kind of fluke, we will be faced with an insidious brain drain as soon as we get there. “Wait. Where are you going? Who will tell me what to do?”
Teachers: Ms. Mayer’s 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 environs either by being too smart — per Mayer’s Law — or not being smart enough, it being a founding proposition of modern educational philosophy that one has no real business educating one’s intellectual superiors.
Lavatories & similar: It also means lavatory cubicles, phone booths, priest-holes and small apartments are just wrong, on principle.[1]
From there, readers, it gets only worse. Ms. Mayer seems to urge those in wrong rooms to get out of them. But, since each of the world’s occupied has, by definition, a smartest occupant, no room on the planet has a stable equilibrium. Occupancy will dwindle, tending quickly to zero.
Indeed, on this topic I have just had an argument with my daughter about who should leave the kitchen. We agreed Antagonista should go. But, dilemma! The minute she left I became the smartest person in the kitchen,[2] so I had to leave, too.
Now I could hardly go into another unoccupied room — what would that achieve? — so, I joined Antagonista in the laundry.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING, DAD?" she yelled at me. “Now I have to leave the laundry.”
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 in and out of all the rooms in the house, we worked out what to do. (It was my daughter’s idea: she’s the smart one.)
So, 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.