I.Q. zero?
nowadays it’s not enough to be smart.
you have to be fascinating and exuberant. you need a dash of color, theatre and drama, on top of a hefty sense of humor.
on the job, you have to be on the ball, spot on, switched on, revved up, always hitting the ground running. you need to know your job and everything else remotely connected to it.
offline, you must know how to order a decent bottle of wine, have stock anecdotes to regale your audience with while properly uncorking the champagne, and given moderate levels of inebriation, dance a mean tango. you can’t just carry a tune, you have to be rocking awesome on the videoke.
you can’t just have a general appreciation for art. you need a well-nurtured eye for impressionists and cubists and neo-impressionists and neo-cubists, distinguish the Seurats from the Monets, Chagall’s whimsy from Kandinski’s quirks. you just have to know something about modern design beyond the Eameses, to actually see Gehry’s amazing silver-gray structures (the one at Bard in upstate NY looks like an armadillo to me) or Frank Lloyd Wright’s starkly geometric window panes. the urbane Pinoy can spot a Kenneth Cobonpue chair, a Budji Layug table or a Cacnio brass sculpture as quickly as you can say “Mies Van de Rohe”.
and shame on you if you missed Matisse’s painting of voluptuous women dancing in the cobalt blue sky at a stairway landing in the MOMA or worse, haven’t visited Juan Luna’s enormous 19th-century masterpiece, the Spoliarium (hmm, not counting the bucolic Amorsolos, how many great Filipino art works have you seen?).
Above: the Alphabet of Design Classics; Philippine National Hero Jose Rizal, who was a polymath and polyglot. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Rizal
beyond the fundamentals of physics, calculus, chemistry and the natural sciences, you have to be a deft Wii warrior and know that “Second Life” does not refer to the afterlife. you compete with digital natives and argue with open-source advocates just for the heck of it. you must have looked Sue the tyrannosaurus rex in the eye and known that he/she was named after a swashbuckling female archeologist.
when you travel to other countries, every tourist you meet is a global citizen. in Prague, i met a young twenty-ish Pinoy who was born in Manila, raised in Philadelphia, was studying Greek art in London and vacationing in the Czech Republic. in Berlin, i had the most interesting conversation with a Democrat from Washington DC who said that Barack Obama is brilliant but might not win the Asian and Latino votes needed to be president.
the new world order
the Googles, Yahoos, Wikipedias, blogspots, CNNs of the world have spawned new rules and standards for over-achievers and new dimensions of stress. just look at the infant and toddler formula milk ads on TV - most of them promise to bring out your child’s greatest potential, i.e., become Boy Wonder/Girl Genius. “intelligent” is for everyone else, your child just has to be a prodigy!
so does this leave the intelligence quotient as nothing more than an antiquated benchmark for abstract reasoning skills? i personally prefer upping my “FF” (Fascinating Factor) or another version of “IQ” (Interesting Quotient). 