Thread by @Dr_TJRicks

Why you should actually want to be the smartest person in the room.

A thread

Everyone always says that “if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”

But akshually,

You might be in the right one.
Let’s discuss. #tjto50k

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Now I wanna say that smarts is relative, but as a whole, we go to places where we can learn.

Some people go on twitter so they can learn about more shit to be outraged about.

Some people go to the library to learn more about history and shit like that.

All of that is cool.

It also means that you could possibly end up being the smartest person in the room.

People say if this happens to you, then you’re doing something wrong.

I disagree with people.

People don’t know shit. And you’re about to learn what people don’t know.

Ready?

Let’s continue.

Being the smartest person means a couple of things.

✅You’ve mastered a subject
✅You have natural curiosity
✅You have a new, valid perspective
✅You’re around other smart people or at least people that want to learn

All of these are good things.

Especially when you think about the student teacher dynamic.

I’ll give my own experience for example.

I teach chemistry 4 days a week.

I am without a doubt the smartest person in that room from 3:35-4:45.

My students learn just as much from me as I do from them.

My students get to learn about chemistry concepts that they’ll probably never use again.

I get to learn several things that are more valuable.

So my class is mostly women.

I’d say 90/10 women to men if not more.

One thing that I’ve had to be mindful of is leadership.

I can’t show up to class unprepared because my students will not take me seriously.

Especially because they are women and I’m a man teaching.

I gotta know my shit.

I gotta be on point.

If not, I lose my class faster than normal and I’m not getting it back.

This is a dynamic that I can take out into the real world and apply in my personal relationships with women.

This is a good opportunity for practice that I wouldn’t have if I wasn’t the smartest person in the room.

They learn chemistry.

I learn a little bit of game. 💋

Being the smartest person in the room also means that people are going to want to actively learn from you.

This is almost never a bad thing.

You want this. It makes you valuable.

You get to provide your own unique perspective on something with your own experiences.

The flow and exchange of knowledge and ideas is paramount to human existence.

If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re one perspective, but you draw the perspectives of many other people.

This is where you benefit if your mind and ears are open.

Having engaged convos with people where they are picking your brain is the perfect opportunity for you to grow as well because you get to ask them questions too!

The part of the reason why people say you shouldn’t be the smartest person is because you constantly get questioned.

What gets lost in the sauce is that you have the ability to question others too!

Scientific conferences are the perfect example of this.

You have a bunch of smartest people in different rooms.

And they don’t know everything, they know everything about their specific field.

When you have two of these people coming together to talk,

You get to exchange ideas that you may not have thought of before because their expertise is similar, but different.

This is why fields collaborate so much.

I’m an organic chemist.

But I also know microbiology.

If I go to a microbiologist conference, I won’t be the smartest microbiologist there, but it’s likely I’ll be the smartest organic chemist there.

Having expertise on a related, but different subject gives me the ability to provide value to others through my unique perspective.

If I’m the smartest organic chemist that knows a good amount of microbiology,

Then I’m able to provide value to microbiologists by giving them good Organic Chem info in their language.

This can be the key to helping their research go farther and that happens very often.

Being the smartest person in the room also means you have the opportunity to grow a following.

When you grow a following, you have an opportunity to create new leaders provided that you are a good leader yourself.

Let’s go back to the teacher dynamic.

I teach like I’m going to be surpassed one day.

This is something that I learned from John C. Maxwell’s book, “Good Leaders Ask Great Questions.”

Being the smartest person in the room means that you can teach others how to be where you are so they can take your place.

When they take your place, you are free to go learn more knowing that your position has been left in good if not great hands.

You’ve created another smartest person in the room as you continue your own quest for new knowledge and experiences.

This is how we truly grow.

I don’t hold anything back when I teach.

I give all of the information plus my own covert tips and tricks that I’ve developed to make things easy for myself.

Because the easier I make it for someone to get to my position, the faster I can go learn a new, valuable skill set.

I did this with one of my formers students who has turned into one of my best friends TJ. This is us at winefest earlier this month.

I was a little drunk that’s why my eyes were closed 😂😂😂

When TJ and I worked together, I was the smartest person in the room.

I taught him everything that I knew so that he could take my position doing experiments.

This freed me up to go study more microbiology stuff that I need to truly understand how I to make my experiments work

Not only did this make us both successful because we ended up publishing this research,

But it made him an excellent chemist and now he’s a superstar in his own chemistry grad program when he didn’t even come to UTK as a chemistry major.

I changed him. I made him grow.

And in doing that, I grew too, and became a better leader.

None of this happens without me being the smartest person in the room.

So today reconsider the stance that you shouldn’t be smahhht.

Remember, everyone has something to learn and grow with.

Don’t be afraid of being the person that everyone learns from.

You grow in the process too.

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