If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room
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Crappy advice you find on LinkedIn™
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We are indebted to Confucius, Jack Welch, or Marissa Mayer, to one of whom — the smartest, presumably? — 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.
But only when we reflect upon the downward spiral this aphorism incites does its become plain: it is a counsel of oblivion.
For if “Mayer’s Law” reveals truths about the world — as it may, for that would explain a few things — they are chastening ones for all of us, whatever group we best identify with:
Clever people: Bad news for brain-boxes. They 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: just brainier than anyone else. 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, by fluke, to get ourselves to the right room — and what are the odds of that? — we will be faced with an insidious brain drain the moment we get there. “Wait. Where are you going? Who will tell me what to do?”
Teachers: This will also be disappointing news for teachers, implying as it does that none of them are where they should be: they disqualify themselves either by being too smart — per Mayer’s Law — or not 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. (There may be an exception for uncommonly dull people in hotels with those high-tech self-flushing loos you find in Japan, but even here someone really ought to be calling a plumber to get the can out of the room).
And from there, readers, it gets only worse. This maxim urges those in wrong rooms to get out of them. But no room on the planet has a stable equilibrium: occupancy must dwindle quickly to zero. It is as if the world should be engaged in a perpetual, collective, fire-drill, calmly evacuating and reassembling itself in a blustery square somewhere near the office.
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, the minute she left I became the smartest person in the kitchen, 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 where I would be safely not the smartest person in the room.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING, DAD?" she yelled at me. “Now I have to leave again.”
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 November, though it looks like it might rain.