On Never Being The Smartest Person In The Room

December 07, 2024

I am never the smartest person in the room – and that’s okay. I am almost never the tallest person in the room either.

It is a lost game, in my opinion, the pursuit of being the best at anything in a world of 8 billion people. Trying to be the best or rather, trying to be portrayed to be the best, incentivises the wrong behaviour. Admitting that I am not the smartest person in the room unburdens me from proving to an external observer and to myself, that I am the smartest.

I can instead utilise every opportunity to learn from anyone who has an interesting idea – be it the college graduate who only joined the team last week or the veteran who has been often called an outdated dinosaur. Here is a list of things I would never have learnt about if smartness ego battles got in the way (battles I would have miserably lost):

• Communicating sequential processes and core/async in Clojure
• The practice of note-taking in Obsidian and the second brain
• Hexagonal architecture
• A laser printer’s relation to open source
• Better command line tools written in Rust
• Courage to do the right thing when it is not easy

I am never going to be the smartest person in the room, but I can be the person who wants to learn the most in the room – and then come out of that room a relatively smarter version of myself.