If you think that you are the smartest person in the room, then it is time to find yourself a bigger room

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I ran across a similar statement in an article by Solomon Timothy at Forbes on February 10, 2022 titled Why you never want to be the smartest person in the room. That sentiment was voiced repeatedly by James Watson, the molecular biologist who along with Francis Crick received the 1962 Nobel prize for proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule.

 

At Quote Investigator on February 21, 2019 Garson O’Toole has an article titled Never be the brightest person in the room: then you can’t learn anything. He mentions a version by Michael Dell in his Commencement Address at University of Texas, Austin 2003 which is:

 

“Try never to be the smartest person in the room. And if you are, I suggest you invite smarter people … or find a different room. In professional circles it’s called networking. In organizations it’s called team building. And in life it’s called family, friends, and community. We are all gifts to each other, and my own growth as a leader has shown me again and again that the most rewarding experiences come from my relationships.”

 

Another variation can be found in an article by Niklas Goeke at Medium on June 30, 2020 titled Don’t be the smartest person in the room – stand next to them:

 

“The late Harold Ramis, known for playing Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters, once articulated it this way: ‘Find the most talented person in the room, and if it’s not you, go stand next to them. Hang out with them. Try to be helpful.’ ”

 

Similar sentiments were expressed by Dwight Eisenhower, who is quoted by Clifford Hudson on page 43 of the 2020 book Master of None as saying:

 

“Always try to associate yourself with, and learn as much as you can from, those who know more than you do, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you do.”

 

In the 2022 book Trust & Inspire by Stephen M. R. Covey et al, on page 250-1 they state at length these words of wisdom:

 

“Those who understand the need for speed and want to go fast often consider themselves the smartest in the room. They don’t have time for others, and they believe they have the skill set they need to accomplish the job by themselves. If they need other people, what they need is for those people to dependably do what they’re told. In a few cases, this might give them an edge, but there’s a price to it, and it’s not sustainable. And more often than not, it yields mediocre results.

 

Those who go far are those who go together. These people recognize that not one of us is smarter than all of us together. The collective ethos and knowledge of teams is what brings about true innovation and creativity. It’s what allows for better ideas, deeper understanding, and happier teams. Those who go far fast never think they are the smartest in the room, they depend on others being more capable than they are and bringing diverse thought and opinion to the team. They seek to work together to innovate – but they do it on the basis of trust, allowing them to go faster as they eliminate misunderstandings and hidden agendas while allowing people to focus on and contribute their greatest strengths. They produce better results in a faster and more effective way. They inspire each other to do their best work.”   

 

Conversely, an article by Dan Forbes at LinkedIn Pulse on March 5, 2015 is titled The Smartest Person in the Room Syndrome, which he acronyms as SPITR (pronounced spitter, and denoting negative behavior).  

 

Images of a sofa and chairs were adapted from Openclipart.

 

An informal mentor who cast a long shadow

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some people who are not our formal mentors nevertheless cast a long shadow over us. For me, one was Dr. Richard V. Lynch, Jr. I met him in June of 1972, when he did my enlistment flight physical for the Air Force Reserve (to become a medic in an air evac squadron). He listened to my heart with a stethoscope and frowned. Then he told me I had an extremely minor murmur, which might even go away as I got older. It wouldn’t prevent me from being on flying status though. Most would not have noticed it, but he was a professor at the West Virginia University medical school.  

 

In a blog post on August 26, 2011 titled Selection bias I discussed another encounter with Dr. Lynch. I was working as a medic in the Air Force Reserve clinic at the Greater Pittsburgh Airport. We did routine flight physicals, each of which included a 12-lead electrocardiogram (EKG). A special die was used to trim 3” samples from those 12 strip charts. Then each set was mounted on a self-adhesive form. Lt. Col. Lynch was our clinic commander. Each afternoon he would eagerly pounce on that stack of EKG forms and go through them with a fine-tooth comb. Dr. Lynch even replotted them as vectorcardiograms. He had realized that if a specialist doesn’t do something about it, he mainly will see referrals where another physician first looked at the patient, ran an EKG, and noticed there was something very wrong. His diagnostic skills gradually will deteriorate. He knew the way to avoid that problem was by looking at a sample of healthy people every month. Those flight physicals were his reality check for staying sharp.

 

Then there was the case of the freaked-out Army Guardsman on a summer Sunday morning. He and a buddy had been out on maneuvers in the woods of South-Central Pennsylvania. They were sleeping in a pup tent. Long before dawn he was startled awake by a raccoon crawling on top of his sleeping bag. He was afraid that the overly curious ‘coon was rabid, he’d been bitten, would get rabies, and would die. His buddy grabbed a jeep and drove them both to the closest military medical facility, which was us. They were already waiting in the parking lot when we opened for sick call at 8:00 AM.

 

Dr. Lynch respectfully listened to his story, and then calmly told him to remove his shirt and undershirt. Then he carefully and meticulously examined the panicked guardsman’s face, chest and arms. Dr. Lynch told him that he didn’t see any puncture marks from bites, or even any scratches. His reassuring manner gradually calmed down that very agitated guardsman.

 

The next year they promoted Dr. Lynch to a full Colonel. It forced him to retire, since the clinic commander position only called for a Major.

 

Richard V. Lynch, Jr. got his MD degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1943. He was an Army captain for two years, and took advanced medical training until June of 1949. Then he practiced internal medicine in Clarksburg, West Virginia for two decades. He also served two four-year terms on the city council. He served as president of the West Virginia Diabetes Association, the West Virginia Heart Association, the West Virginia Tuberculosis and Heath Association, and the West Virginia State Medical Association. Then he became a professor at the West Virginia University medical school in Morgantown, and chief of their hospital’s outpatient department. He eventually retired, and died in 1997 at age 78.   

 

The image came from a trailer for the Hitchcock movie The Wrong Man at Wikimedia Commons.

 

A superficial Pathways project: Introduction to Toastmasters Mentoring

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Level 2 of the Pathways educational program from Toastmasters International has a mandatory project titled Introduction to Toastmasters Mentoring, which can be downloaded here. It discusses the roles of the mentor and protégé, that mentoring can be virtual, and the differences between mentoring and coaching. But it is rather superficial, implying (as shown above) that the process just involves a more experienced mentor and an inexperienced protégé (aka mentee).

 

The mentor gets a Mentor Assignment Notice (Item 1163C, 11/2018) which you can find here.

 

Toastmaster magazine has lots of useful articles about mentoring, which add additional useful information not in that introductory Pathways project. For example, since over two decades ago there also has been a variation known as reverse mentoring. Back in May 2014 John Cadley had quipped that:

 

“If you’ve ever had to ask a 6-year-old how to work your smartphone, you’ve been reverse mentored.”

 

Here is a list of authors and titles for 21 magazine articles from the last decade (and one from Leadership Central). For those posted at the magazine web site I have included a link. Others can be viewed by downloading the .pdf file for an issue and looking at the listed page numbers.   

 

Karen Ince, September 2021: Page 11 - The advantages of an atypical mentorship

 

Jennifer Blanck, February 2021: Pages 14 and 15 - The value of virtual connections

 

Stanley Aruyaru, October 2020: Pages 20 and 21 - Mentorship in Toastmasters and Medicine

 

Deepak Menon, November 2019: Page 2 - Magical Mentoring

 

(Not identified), April 2019 at Leadership Central - Happy mentoring!

 

Dana LaMon, April 2018: Pages 20 and 21 - The meaning of good mentoring

 

Bill Brown, February 2018: Page 15 - Finding the Ideal Mentor

 

Mitch Mirkin, September 2017: Pages 12 and 13 - UCLA Mentor Steve Yu

 

Jennifer L. Blanck, December 2016: Page 29 - Online Mentoring

 

Jim Kokocki, December 2015: Page 2 - What does mentorship look like?

 

Alex Malley, May 2015: Page 14 - My top five tips for the budding mentor

 

Kristen Marble, May 2015: Page 15 - The two-way street of mentorship

 

Paul Sterman, September 2015: Page 28 - Mentoring Matters

 

Caren Neile, October 2014: Pages 26 and 27 - E.J. Burgay: A mentor to remember

 

Julie Bawden-Davis, May 2014: Pages 16 to 19 - Harness the power of mentoring

 

John Cadley, May 2014: Page 30 - Be a mentor!

 

Jennifer Przbylo and Nina Vasan, October 2013: Page 21 - How to be a great mentor

 

Jennifer L. Blanck, May 2013: Pages 16 to 19 - The many dimensions of mentoring

 

Aletta Rochat, May 2012: Pages 28 and 29 - Anyone can be a mentor

 

Bob Calandra, October 2011: Pages 14 and 15 - The benefits of mentoring

 

Maureen Zappala, July 2011: Pages 16 to 18 - Intergenerational collaboration

 

Bob Armstrong, January 2011: Pages 14, 15, 23 - The joy of mentoring

 

There also is a collection of Meet My Mentor articles here.

 

We are carried along by our mentors

Recently I was listened to one of AlejAndro Anastasio’s One Hand Speaks podcasts titled The difference a few kind words can make in a person’s life. He described how his high school art teacher inspired his career in art. That got me thinking about some similar mentoring experiences I had. My first also happened in high school. I had blogged about it in a March 1, 2013 post titled Does your speaking voice sound like a little girl? One of my dad’s old friends, Dr. John F. Kahles, had visited us and after dinner told me a fascinating story about metallurgical engineering. It started me toward majoring in metallurgy at Carnegie-Mellon University. (His memorial tribute is at the National Academy of Engineering).

John told us about selecting materials for the teeth on the bottom of the scoop to a front end loader or bulldozer. Those teeth have to deal with contacting both sand and rocks. Sand is abrasive and will rub and wear away material.

Repeatedly hitting rocks causes cracking (impact fatigue) at the surface, and the cracks can grow inward until a tooth breaks off.  An obvious solution for reducing the abrasive wear rate from the sand would be to make the teeth harder, so they would wear out less rapidly.

But if that’s all that is changed, then you just switch failure modes. The impact fatigue cracks were not a problem before because they grew so slowly that they just were worn away. When you just increase the hardness, the cracks can grow faster until the teeth now can break off rather than wear out. So, before you can raise the hardness, you need to think about how to change the impact fatigue behavior. 

Another experience happened when I was a junior, and finally got to choose a metallurgy course as an elective. Our class advisor, professor Robert Dunlap, told Bob McIntyre and I to take a big leap and enroll in the graduate course on Alloy Steels. It was taught by the department head, Harold W. Paxton, using  E. C. Bain and H. W. Paxton’s book, Alloying Elements in Steel. Professor Dunlap said that a lot of the course will probably go right over your heads, but it might be the only chance you get to learn that topic from a true master. I struggled to get a B, but was fascinated. Six years later I got a job doing applied research on alloy steels at the Climax Molybdenum Company lab in Ann Arbor, Michigan.     

Much later I got to be the mentor. On April 28, 2009 I blogged about the Joy of teaching college students – talking about corrosion and materials selection in a guest lecture at Boise State University.

Ernst Nowak’s painting of a piggyback ride, and a photo of a front end loader both came from Wikimedia Commons.

The ugly side of criticism

On July 1st Joel Heffner blogged about what he termed The Ugly Side of Toastmasters. He began by praising them for being:

“...the best to help you to overcome your fear of public speaking.”

But, then he started sniping about how a speech evaluator might not know enough, and thus miss key points. Then he proclaimed that, instead:

“If you want to become a proficient speaker, find someone who knows how to speak who will help you.”

Well, Toastmasters already does that. Like the Prego sauce slogan says, it’s in there. Each new member is assigned a more experienced member as a mentor by the club’s Vice President Education (see page 16 of When You are the Vice President Education). The mentor provides evaluation feedback to help a speaker improve. Toastmaster magazine repeatedly has discussed this in articles like The Joy of Mentoring, The Magic of Mentoring, and Leadership - the ultimate mentor.

Also, you’d expect an experienced teacher to proofread his copy before posting. There still were a pair of typos (corrections in CAPS):

“After you make ten speeches, you have (ARE) given the title of Competent Communicator.”

“Too often the evaluator simple (SIMPLY) goes by the guidelines set forth by Toastmasters, in their manuals.”

Joy of having mentors

Back in September one of my mentors, Frank Borik died at age 85. I met Frank in 1977 when I started working at the Ann Arbor research laboratory of the Climax Molybdenum Company. Frank was a little guy with a bow tie, a mustache, and a grin that was a walking definition for the phrase “joie de vivre.” He worked on a wide variety of steels for various applications including ship plate, pipelines, springs, and bearings. Frank was a versatile guy with strong, well-researched opinions on many topics.

Some people metaphorically soar like eagles - Frank literally did so. He was a sailplane (glider) pilot. In 1974 he earned a Silver badge from the Soaring Society of America. Achieving that badge meant that after being towed aloft he had: stayed airborne for five hours, gained 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) of altitude, and covered a horizontal distance of 50 km (31 miles). He helped found the Sandhill Soaring Club, and was both their president and an instructor pilot.

Frank was born in Czechoslovakia in 1923. He came to the US after the Communist takeover, and went through MIT on a scholarship. After completing his BS degree in 1953, he moved to the Detroit area and worked for ten years in the auto industry at Chrysler and Ford. Then he moved to the Climax Molybdenum Company lab, where he stayed for 22 years. He earned both his MS (Wayne State University, 1965) and PhD (University of Michigan, 1975) degrees while working full time.