It’s smart to pretend to be stupid – here are six reasons why

I love this.
I think if more people would close thier mouth and open their ears…they could open their minds to other points of view and expand on so many levels. (including in business, folks!)
One of the biggest issues I see with people struggling to make something of themselves is the inability to get out of their own way.
Ask questions.
Then be quiet and listen to the answers.
Then ask more questions.
We don’t know everything, and that’s okay.

I think we may have shared a Grandma. 🙂 This post reminded me fondly of a couple things she endlessly repeated to me.

You know what you know ’till someone knows more or knows it better.

If you ever just think you’re pretending not to know it all, you’re already doomed.

How many times have we heard half of a random sentence and learned something astounding?

My most recent listing was a couple baseball throws from Clairemont Hi. 🙂

Good point Peggy. I guess we should all be open-minded investigators. You make some great points, and now I’m thinking another reason to pretend stupid is maybe the smart people we interact with are playing stupid and learning that the BIG EGO in the room, who isn’t listening, is actually the dumb one….but they (BIG EGO) don’t know it. Arrgggg….reverse, reverse dimensional thinking.

Thanks for the feedback. Cheers.

I was once at a Navy conference where the agenda was to revamp the whole bibliography of study materials for Navy Cryptologists to make it more current and relevant. One of the publications on the chopping block was titled “Security and Emergency Destruction.” The room was chock-a-bloc with big hitters in our little slice of Navy-dom, all spouting how out-dated and obsolete the material was (a course designed to teach safeguarding highly classified material, and how to destroy it securely and rapidly in the case of emergency/enemy acts, etc.). The conversation went on for a good 45 minutes until Master Chief Wally Bischer – who had not said a word – simply stated “what’s the fastest way to make a CT (crypto-tech) a non-CT (lose their job)?”

He acted stupid up until the point he revealed his brilliance – keep the course and update it, or remove it and risk compromise of material due to lack of education.

My comment may not be too relevant to most folks on here – but it’s the first thing I thought of – my big mouth got me in to plenty of pinches in my younger days – pinches I could have avoided by shutting up and listening before acting. Thanks for another great referesher, Ken!

Navy Chief, Navy Pride

Warning a big generalization coming up:) I’m a Brit who spent a year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and now live in Canada where my daughter is at elementary school. The North American education system in my (limited) experience encourages and rewards the student to say something, anything. The number of classes I took where a student just repeated what had been said by the teacher was in the majority. At my daughters school you get get marks for contributing anything. Even at Real estate school hans would shoot up to ask the most inane questions.
If your educated this way its a difficult habit to break, to just keep your mouth shut..

Good advice. I know a former professor of applied Mathematics who said that once he reached the highest terminative level of Math — a Ph.D. — he realized how much he DIDN’T know. Whereas he would constantly encounter individuals who were studying at the lower levels of math, such as Bachelor’s level students who thought the knew a lot about math.

The point is, no matter how much we think we know, it’s not nearly as much as we actually know, and sometimes it takes trying to completely master a subject, to learn all that is humanly possible to know about it, to finally arrive at an appreciation for how little we REALLY know.

This is a strategy that has stood the test of time over and over. And you’re making a good point overall…. but I think we all know that nobody expects stupid people to listen and observe carefully…..

This article is gompletely false and operates on assumptions no “smart” person would make. Intelligent people are always curious and open to learning new things. That’s WHY we’re smart. It’s the idiots who falsely believe they are smart who stubbornly refuse to learn anything.