The 12 True Signs of A Highly Intelligent Person
If you have these twelve traits, then there is a high chance you are highly intelligent
When it comes to genius, people are just born with it and it is as simple as that, you either have it or you don’t, intelligence is different. It is earned, and everybody can be intelligent if they wish to be.
Here are twelve signs that typically show a person to be of high intelligence.
They have an exceptionally curious mind
Why is the grass green? Why does that person think like that? Why does that person think that? Why do we exist? What’s on the other side of the road? How do I fix that problem? The only way to find the answers is to be curious enough to ask the questions.
If you’re not a curious person then you are never going to ask questions and if you don’t ask questions you never get answers. If you never get answers you never know anything and if you never know anything you cannot ever hope to be intelligent. It is as simple as that.
That is why intelligent people have such exceptionally curious minds, because it is that curiosity that fuels their avid desire to learn. And a willingness to learn is the key to intelligence.
They are an expert at self-analysis
Let’s say that you have written a short story, how do you know if it is any good? Well first, you read it yourself and make a judgement. Then you edit it and try to improve it. Then perhaps you allow somebody else to read it, you listen to what they say about it. Then you edit it some more, and read it again and make a judgement.
When you are happy with it you publish it, you see how it does. Then you analyse your entire process from beginning to end to see if you can find a way to improve it and write a better short story.
This process can be replicated with everything, from how you handle your love life to how you handle your work life, to how you handle your mental health, to everything. The more you analyse yourself, the way you do things, the better you get at doing things.
That’s why intelligent people are self analysers, because they know that the only way to improve yourself is to constantly analyse yourself in search of improvement.
They have a solid understanding of the law of reciprocation
Have you ever been given a gift that you did not want, and yet you still felt obliged to return the favour by giving a gift in return? Have you ever been given a freebie by a charity that you didn’t want, and yet when they asked for a donation in return, you felt obliged to give it? Have you ever been happy about either of these occurrences happening to you?
The law of reciprocation is the instinctual law that explains why if ever any person does something for us or gives us anything, we always feel the need to return the favour.
The law is so powerful that the only way the majority of us can counteract it is by avoiding any person giving us anything or doing anything for us. Meaning if ever a person gives us something or does anything for us, whether we want them to not, we find ourselves feeling obligated to return the favour.
Intelligent people fully understand this along with all other implications of the law which is why they tend to always get good deals — it is also why people tend to like them. Because they know that the best way to get a good deal, is by giving a good deal and avoiding people who wish to give you things you don’t want like they are plague carriers.
If they are wrong, or there is a better way of doing something, they want to know
If you are in the wrong, it’s really important to acknowledge it because that’s the path to being in the right. Also, if you are doing something in a way that is not the best way of doing it, and somebody tells you as such, it’s really important to be able to acknowledge that they are right so that you can start doing it in the best way.
There is more to it. If somebody asks you a question, and you don’t know the answer and yet try to hide the fact that you don’t know the answer, either by trying to answer it or bypass the question somehow, then you are never going to know the answer to the question.
That’s why intelligent people readily admit if they don’t know the answer to a question, and readily admit if they are wrong, because they always want to have the right answers.
They are not fast to react unless they have to be
If you don’t have to react instantly, then you should not react instantly, because the quickest way to make a mistake is a swift reaction. That means the more time you are able to spend considering how to respond the better the odds are your response will be the right one.
Let’s say you are listening to somebody, and they say something you dislike, and you immediately express that dislike without letting them finish and without actually thinking about the full context of what they were saying.
The odds are in this scenario what will happen is the person will react angrily in response, and now you will be involved in a tense situation that will never be resolved.
However, if you had allowed the person to finish, and if instead of challenging them you had made efforts to try to understand them, you would have kept them on side and if they were in the wrong with what they were saying, you would have earned the power to potentially change their viewpoint.
That’s why intelligent people only ever react fast if they have to, because they want to make certain that when and if they do react, it’s in the most productive manner.
They avoid needless drama
Energy is finite, and every time you do anything whether it’s talking, thinking, fretting, arguing, whatever, you use emotional energy. That means any pointless dramas that you get into, whether that be online, in the real world, whatever, you’re going to expend emotional energy.
If the dramas you get involved with have no hope of yielding a positive benefit upon your life other than an ego boost from having shouted somebody down, which you most likely will not achieve because they most likely will shout back just as hard, then you have wasted a ton of energy for nothing.
Intelligent people know this, which is why they never waste energy on needless drama. They save it for use on things that can provide a positive benefit to their lives.
They are great at adapting
There is nothing in this world that can screw a person over more than being rigid. Literally, rigidness, whether it be in regard to what you like, the way you like what you like, the way things should be done, what is right and wrong, what is the best practice, whatever. Rigidness is the enemy of happiness and success. The more rigid you are the less hope you have of being happy and successful.
On the flipside, the more willing you are to adapt the better the chances you have of finding happiness and success. For example, imagine there is an immovable roadblock, and you want to get to the end of the road, a person who is poor at adapting will try to go through the immovable roadblock, a person who is great at adapting will be smart enough to know that it is simply better to find a different route.
That’s why intelligent people are great at adapting, because they know that it is the fastest path to happiness and success.
They set their goals in the simplest possible form
Imagine deciding that you want to find love, and then building up an image of what you want that love to be like, so how you want it to be formed, what you want the wedding to be like, the life to be like, imagine building up an entire image of how you want things to go from beginning to end.
How in the hell are you going to ever achieve all of that? The goal is way too specific. There are gazillions of different forms of love, and gazillions of different ways love can form. Why limit yourself to such a specific goal which will be virtually impossible to achieve, when you can improve your chances of success through simplifying your goal.
That’s why in this case the smart option would be to simply set a goal of finding love, and rather than setting any other parameters of how you want it to be formed, what you want it to be like, leaving it just at that. By doing that you give yourself the chance of letting that love form however it wants to form.
Intelligent people know that which is why they always set their goals, whatever they are, in the most simplistic form possible.
Their desire to understand is greater than their desire to judge
Some argue it is human nature to be judgemental, and that everyone is judgemental in some shape or form. Whether that is true or not is irrelevant, what matters is that the more judgemental you are, the less you learn, and the less you learn, the less intelligent you are.
That person with that viewpoint that you think is lamentable, if you judge them instead of trying to understand them, you will never understand why they have that viewpoint. If you don’t understand why they have it, you will never know for certain that it is lamentable.
Only by being non-judgemental can you ever learn other people’s perspectives, and only by learning other people’s perspectives can you ever get a rounded view. And only with a rounded view, can you ever know for certain that your view is the right one.
Intelligent people’s understanding of this reality is one of the key reasons they are intelligent, because rather than judging perspectives instead they are always learning about them.
They listen a lot more than they talk
When you are talking you are not learning, which means inevitably the more you talk the less chance you have to listen, meaning inevitably the less chance you have of building intelligence.
It really is simple this one, the more you listen to people and the more people you listen to the more intelligent you are going to be because the more rounded your viewpoint is going to become.
That doesn’t mean you have to believe every word a person says, quite the opposite, it just means you need to spend more time listening than talking otherwise how else will you be able to learn i.e. there are billions of people on this planet but only one of you. You can’t ever hope to learn from those billions if you spend all your time talking.
Intelligent people fully understand this which is why they listen a lot more than they talk, because doing so gives them the chance to learn.
They endeavour to be as open-minded as possible
If your mind is not open, you will never gain the life experience and rounded perspectives that you need to be truly intelligent.
The Art of War a.k.a. the Sun Tzu, highlights that the key to making good decisions is by taking in the whole. You cannot take in the whole unless you are incredibly open-minded, especially in the world in which we now live with all the different viewpoints that exist within it.
That’s why intelligent people are extremely open-minded, because it’s the best way to gain all the life experience and information that you need from all sides of the spectrum to make an informed decision.
They accept that just because something is right today, it doesn’t mean it will be right tomorrow
How can you ever question whether something that many believe to be right, is wrong, unless your mind knows that just because something may be right now doesn’t mean it will be right tomorrow?
What is right and what is wrong and what is the best way to do something and what are the best practices are constantly changing. That means if you wish to keep up with society, you have to be willing to accept that what you believe to be right today, could be wrong tomorrow and vice versa, what is seen as wrong today, could be seen as right tomorrow.
It can be tough to get your head around this one but understanding the contextual history of what is deemed right and wrong, understanding truly why things are seen as right and wrong at the times they are, the societal and evolutionary benefits of them being seen that way at the times they are seen that way, can give a person an immense intellectual advantage. Allowing them to stay well ahead of the crowd.
That’s why intelligent people don’t see things as being right or wrong per se, they see things as being right or wrong based on the present evidence, because that way if the evidence changes, they have no problem acknowledging it.
That’s all from me, thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy the following:
The Fifteen Greatest Human Innovations in All of History
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