My Defintion of Intelligence

I personally define intelligence as the application of knowledge. The world is a very unfair and crude world, like a siren singing her predatory song, we too become drawn into the idea that intelligence is made and molded in the classroom, in higher academia, that it is the ability to solve complex trigonometry and calculus equations; but I beg to differ. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs never finished their college degrees but are both widely held as being very bright and intelligent men of our time. This is not to dissuade people from further education on the contrary both were heavily influenced by university. Bill Gates grew up around the University in Seattle and would often visit the campus’s large computer mainframe. In a show of his intelligence, he scored a 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT. Steve Jobs dropped out of college because of the financial burden he was putting his family through, but he decided to continue attending classes (for free) and credits his calligraphy class as the inspiration for his creation of textual fonts in his NEXT system. These two men show the power of further education and its direct impact on them, but without their active application, such instruction would be found useless. One may be the most knowledgeable person yet know little of human empathy and lacks the ability to communicate, is this person considered intelligent? As said previously, intelligence is the application of knowledge, not the context of it! One standard by which the world tries to dictate who is an intelligent person is by means of an IQ test, but we now realize there are many different scales of intelligence ranging from emotional to existential to linguistic…… Instead of trying to stereotype people based on their educational background or employment, which is then used to judge one’s value to society, we need to start looking at the PERSON because we are not all the same, nor should we be. WE each bring our own diversity, and it is that diversity, that different way of thinking, that increases our global intelligence and allows for new knowledge. For sake of my reader, you the class, I will promptly end here and not even discuss my views of musician, fashion victims, or the such.