I’ve noticed in working that oftentimes the people who are taken for intelligent and amazing are genuinely not that smart. Rather than becoming annoyed by it, is there a way to harness this dynamic to my benefit and use it to get a foot up?

To illustrate, I worked with a lot of women on my team at work- some were SUPER brilliant- one had been valedictorian of her class and breezed through every AP course possible as a teen, had a Masters degree in a STEM field, another was super quick on the uptake and spoke 4 languages. Yet I found in working there, other coworkers overlooked these seriously brilliant and amazing women and instead focused in on one of the least educated and poor thinking women in our group as intelligent. They didn’t know her history but she was someone who barely managed to get her GED and had been held back in high school. Couldn’t write that well and barely understood math. Yes, it’s true school performance really isn’t an indicator of intelligence, but she was also an incredibly poor thinker- taking longer to understand tasks and still not getting the gist completely. Having really staunch opinions on politics, world problems that were poorly put together and left out hugely relevant points. Just in general, not that bright. She presented well, and I guess that hid some of it. But she didn’t present better than the other much smarter girls.

I wonder what it was about her that made people convinced she was intelligent when she really wasn’t. And if I could harness it to improve/ hack people’s perception of me as well.

The only thing I can think of was that she was incredibly proud and confident- even when she had answers wrong or had thought things through in a way that was actually shamefully poor. Like she’d be very adamant with her opinions arms crossed, no one can tell her different, in fact correcting others. But when you ask her more about it you realize she actually didn’t even have a basic understanding of how things work and only considered a tiny percentage of the points she shoudlve in coming to this ultra staunch conclusion.

I feel the confidence was kinda coming from stupidity. Being too slow to grasp the full range of available valid answers, or different things that could have an impact on the answer you could come to. A more intelligent person looking at it would know there’s some many variables and influences that there may not be a staunch right answer and therefore present as more unsure of themselves in giving one even though they had wayyyyy more facts and knowledge than here and thought it through far more extensively.

I feel a lot of the confidence came from being to stupid to even have an idea of what she may not know, where she may be falling short. Thinking your limited closet of thought is genuinely the whole castle and thus being ultra confident because you wrongly think there’s nothing to be considered beyond that and you have things super thoroughly figured out.

The other thing that could’ve been a factor is that most of the people who thought she was amazing were kind of simple thinking, low level workers themselves. So maybe they just identified with her because she was closer to being on their level and more comfortable to them. Versus the other girl getting her Masters in STEM who mayve been so genuinely brilliant they didn’t “get” her. I wonder what the genuine ultra educated upper management really thought of her. Their view was very opaque but mayve been different.

I guess the only thing I can take from this is present your ideas as if you have not a shadow of doubt about them/ with maximum confidence. Had anyone else experienced this phenomenon with someone not that bright being thought of as brilliant in a work setting? Can you isolate anything they were doing different from the average person to achieve this affect that could be harnessed and appropriated?

It can honestly be rather obnoxious. Because she was so prideful and kind of full of herself even in situations where she was dead wrong or showing below a basic level of understanding of something. But I figure it’s better to copy it/ start using it to your advantage than be annoyed with it

Trouble is- I genuinely think it may take a significant level of ignorance and blind stupidity about the actual scope of the world and different ways to view things and think to be so unerringly, hard headedly confident all the time. Like I suspect you honestly need to be a bit blissfully ignorant in some ways, to do it.

Fact remains, a lot of how far you get in the working world is based on how you’re perceived and not necessarily who you are and what you actually have to offer. So it’s better to just play the game and ensure you’re getting exactly what you fucking want out of it, rather than complaining it’s unfair or rigged. Learn to use those quirks to your advantage