There is a person, or God forbid, a group of persons, that goes around turning phrases in a template-driven, ‘look how clever I am’ type of way to impress the common man and woman who are easily wowed by such attempted cleverness. By phrase turns such as, ‘Meditation is not about finding a quiet mind, a quiet mind finds itself in meditation’, or ‘life is not about learning from hard knocks but knocking hard on doors of opportunity’ or like the one my cousin forwarded to me today, ‘dream is effortless sleep, aim is sleepless effort’. Really twisted attempts at turning a phrase, playing with words to convey nothing but a bloated sense of vaingloriousness.
Compare this pathetic convoluted attempt to something simple and elegant like, ‘Happiness is what you are, stress is what you want to be’.
That’s’ the difference between cleverness and intelligence. Any piece that draws attention itself usually smacks of cleverness. Intelligence guides you, stands aside and lets you absorb the essence of what it’s communicating without attracting attention to how the message is phrased whereas cleverness stands in its gaudy offensive garb on the sidewalk of mediocrity soliciting attention like a streetwalker for a few words of praise from the citizens of Easily Impressed country.
Intelligence communicates the meaning of the message. Cleverness focuses on itself.
Communication is not about how clever you are; it’s about how best to get the message across and how much or little the other person knows.
In other words: Intelligence is more about wordless meaning, where as cleverness is about meaningless words, to coin a phrase.
Compare this pathetic convoluted attempt to something simple and elegant like, ‘Happiness is what you are, stress is what you want to be’.
That’s’ the difference between cleverness and intelligence. Any piece that draws attention itself usually smacks of cleverness. Intelligence guides you, stands aside and lets you absorb the essence of what it’s communicating without attracting attention to how the message is phrased whereas cleverness stands in its gaudy offensive garb on the sidewalk of mediocrity soliciting attention like a streetwalker for a few words of praise from the citizens of Easily Impressed country.
Intelligence communicates the meaning of the message. Cleverness focuses on itself.
Communication is not about how clever you are; it’s about how best to get the message across and how much or little the other person knows.
In other words: Intelligence is more about wordless meaning, where as cleverness is about meaningless words, to coin a phrase.
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