an intellectual?

Intelligence is the single worst afflication with which any human can possibly be diagnosed; you spend the majority of your life wondering why others don't understand. -me


Today I heard someone reference a common acquaintance of mine as a "smart" individual. Now, I'm not a genius, nor am I approaching the lower end of the status [let's be honest, it doesn't know I exist], but said person is not someone I would even kindly refer to as mildly educated or even topically knowledgeable. The comment got me wondering what exactly leads us to believe that someone is, in fact, intellectually capable. The answer seems obvious; is it, though?

In high school it was grades; in college it was more an integration of involvement (leading to power, but not quite there), grades and social interaction; in the professional world, the power trait is overwhelmingly more dominant than before, grades are [in many cases] directly replaced by income, and, thankfully, a coexistence of experience and reliability are typically contributing factors to a person's perceived level of intelligence.

That being said, how many of you have received email from a CEO, President or similar executive of importance, that appeared to be more saturated with grammatical error than any relevent content? No need to raise your hands - I can't see you, but I know you're there. I've more than once sat down to begin "Idiot's Grammer and Punctuation: There/Their usage and much more, for today's CEOs." Intelligent? It's an obviously flawed arguement and in no way worthy of the generalization, but the fact remains that one's capacity for knowledge, and therefore their relative categorization, is left up to perception. You can very clearly make it in business without knowing that you shouldn't end your sentences with a preposition [or what exactly is a preposition, for that matter].

Knowledge today is at our fingertips: it's in our mobiles, laptops and PDAs. Somewhere in the internet's phenomenal transformation into a source of instantanious, up-to-date information, we've made irrelevent the ability to accurately regurgitate factual information. We've come so far so quickly that our educational system has yet to develop into an applicable model. We continue to teach facts and figures, ignoring the reality that most careers today require only two things [in incredibly simplified terms]: experience supplemented by coachability and the intrinsic capability to produce results. Neither of these require information recall, in direct terms. If you can find an answer, you can succeed.

Who is intelligent: the individual who knows the facts but can't account for varying circumstance, or the one who can pro-actively seek a solution regardless?