“Smart” is a catch-all adjective/trait of an individual’s mental capabilities, but smart is highly multi-dimensional. Some people can be smart at counting cards but not smart at predicting actions of others. When I judge someone for “smartness”, I typically try to break it down into 4 orthogonal components: Intelligence, Creativity, Wisdom, and Charisma. These collectively span 2 dimensions: Unconscious Concepts vs. Conscious Beings, and In-Bound vs. Out-Bound.
Intelligence and Creativity deal with Unconscious Concepts, such as physics and art. Intelligence is the In-bound ability gain additional information and models based on studying what others have already done. An Intelligent person is someone who could easily understand and recite the works of Shakespeare and Nietzsche and Feynmann. Creativity, on the other hand, is the Out-Bound ability to create new information and mental models, either by recombining concepts in novel ways or through de novo construction. A Creative person is someone who can create new information or models worth learning.
Intelligence and Creativity are needed to different degrees for different roles. A top-tier scientific researcher, for example, requires very high Creativity, but only moderate Intelligence to learn the foundations and the state-of-the-art of his narrow field. A top-tier stock analyst, on the other hand, requires very high Intelligence to learn the constant deluge of new quarterly reports, but only moderate Creativity insofar as the latter helps him make synthesized recommendations to Buy, Sell, or Hold.
Wisdom and Charisma deal with Conscious Beings, which at least for the time being are exclusively humans. Wisdom is the ability to observe other humans and accurately predict their future actions based on their words, their body language, their associates’ opinions, and their historical decisions. A Wise person is someone who can distinguish con-men from geniuses and bluster from conviction. Charisma is the ability to influence other humans to deviate from their pre-planned paths into a different proposed route and destination. A Charismatic person is someone who can recruit the top talent away from prestigious and high-paying jobs to crazy loonshot ambitions.
In the context of startups, Wisdom and Charisma are the key attributes of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, respectively. The VC’s primary task is to sift through a myriad potential businesses and founders to find the ones most likely to succeed, enriching for the long-tail outliers that can return the whole fund. Investment primarily requires Wisdom in judging whether the founders will make the right hard decisions when the time comes. The founder’s primary job is to use his Charisma to acquire the 3 C’s: comrades, customers, and capital. A startup is an entity that did not exist before, and for anyone to tie his fortunes to a startup is a little crazy and requires a little charisma-induced irrationality and faith.
Importantly, as conscious beings, our “smart” components are not static, or at least they do not have to be. When I was in high school, I was Intelligent but not much else. I did well in Olympiad competitions that test knowledge, and didn’t participate in high school research competitions. In undergrad, I went through a tough and painful transition to Creativity, because Creativity isn’t just throwing blobs of metaphorical colored ink at a canvas. Creativity actually requires that you reject 99% of the ideas that seem beautiful at first glance so that the last 1% can be built out to something valuable. In the last few years as a professor and an entrepreneur, I’ve discovered that I have some talent in Charisma and can recruit with relatively high success rates, but I’ve also discovered that I have a long way to go in terms of identifying people’s intentions and predicting the roles and teams where each can best thrive.
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