Why Smart People Hurt. Eric Maisel

      INTRODUCTION: THE CHALLENGES OF SMART

      Who speaks to the challenges faced by the 1 billion people with a better-than-average ability to think? Who speaks to you?

      I hope to do a little of that speaking in this book.

      This isn't a book about what smart is or how many people are smart or how many people are really smart. It's a book about the challenges that smart people face, however smart is defined and whatever the number of smart people. It is a book about the challenges that you face.

      Smartness is a smart person's defining characteristic. Everything she thinks about the world—how she forms her identity, how she construes her needs, how she talks to herself about her life purposes and goals—is a function of how her particular brain operates. She is her smartness in a way that she is not her height, her gender, her moods, or her experiences. Her particular mind with its particular intelligence is the lens through which she looks at life, and it is also the engine that drives her days and her nights. It is her idiosyncratic brain, mind, and intelligence that determine how she will live—and why.

      An aspect of her self-awareness is the knowledge that she is smart. She is aware very early on that she is a little or a lot different from the people around her, and this sense of difference—which can be experienced as grand (or grandiose), as alienating, as mortifying, as wonderful, as burdensome—is her abiding sense of herself.

      She may also be smart and not quite know it. She may receive so many messages early on about “people like her” not being smart that she may not identify herself as a smart person—while at the same time being one. This painful situation, in which she doubts that she is smart because of her early experiences, is likewise a defining feature of her life. She may as a result make choices “below” her level of smartness while at the same time recognizing that the people who occupy “positions of smartness” above her are no smarter than she is.

      We have these many different scenarios to consider. One smart person will be born into a family of smart people where his smartness is identified immediately and where smartness is revered. Another smart person will be born into a family of smart people who have always minimized their own smartness, dislike what they call “putting on airs,” and see it as their duty to put him in his place from birth. Each smart person has his own story to tell—and his special challenges to face.

      What are those special challenges? Each person experiences different ones, but here are fifteen that many people have in common: