What are the real differences between education, intelligence, smarts, and wisdom?

How often have you heard someone call someone else smart? What does smart mean? Smart is a generic, nebulous term that we offer to describe a variety of characteristics. Because many people define smart differently, it’s important to use more precise terms when trying to describe someone, yourself, or what you’re looking for.

Daniel Goleman and Travis Bradberry separately found that emotional Intelligence is linked to how many words one uses to describe his or her emotions. Someone who can differentiate and articulate the difference between anger, annoyance, irritation, and rage has higher emotional intelligence than someone who uses mad to describe each of these emotions. We can apply this logic to domains, like how we use smart. Before we dive in, let us start by defining these terms before we tease out their intricate differences.

Defining smart

Smart is difficult to define. There are four parts of speech in which we can use smart: as a noun, adjective, adverb, verb. There are seven adjective definitions, two verbs, three nouns, and one adverb. That means that we can use smart in thirteen ways! No wonder so many people use smart to describe everything. We call a twelve-year-old who scored well on a test smart. We refer to a forty-five-year-old who figured out how to install her Apple CarPlay smart. And we call a seventy-year-old who provided a sermon on the meaning of life, smart.

Are these three people smart? Yes. Or maybe. It is better to refer to these three in clearer, more descriptive, and narrower ways. We do this to categorize better what we are looking for in partners, friends, and employees. When we search for smart employees, and we find educated employees, we might be in trouble if what we need is someone who is able to solve problems and think across domains.

Defining intelligence

Intelligence is also ubiquitous, but we can narrow down its definition in a few, simple ways. First, as popularized by Daniel Goleman, we can refer to emotional intelligence. We can define emotional intelligence (EQ) as the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions. An emotionally intelligent person is someone who can, for example, navigate a heated situation without raising his voice. The other intelligence type we can refer to is reasoned.

A person with reasoning intelligence is someone who has a high intelligence quotient (IQ). We have many “IQ tests” that are pattern-recognition and time-based. Additionally, someone with a high IQ can quickly and consistently comprehend what she reads. Often, when we refer to someone as smart, we should instead use intelligence based on how they responded to a situation.

Defining education

Ten years ago, we could easily define Education. Recently, education’s definition has complicated as formal education has fallen out of favor. Traditionally, education is a formal type of learning conducted in a classroom setting by domain-expert teachers through an accredited body like a university.

Education has widened in scope to include any skills-based curriculum that scaffolds knowledge and includes some cumulative performance measurement to articulate comprehension. Unfortunately, as time has shown, education is ripe for gamification, and many people have found many ways to earn degrees and certificates without learning the material and achieving domain expertise. This is why we run into situations where those with post-secondary degrees can perform worse than someone who is self-taught without any degree.

Defining wisdom

Wisdom is the body of domain-specific knowledge one acquires over a long time. I’m not wise in anything except how to navigate life with only one parent as I’ve had the requisite twenty years of experience. But, not all twenty years of experience are created equally. A twenty-year bank teller may not be wise to all the nuances of navigating human relationships in the context of personal finance without spending time to actively cultivate a relationship with personal finance.

We sometimes problematically relate age to wisdom, making many assumptions about how one has navigated her career or life experiences. Just because someone has thirty years of experience does not mean that person is wise in that area. Similarly, because someone in their fifties is not updated on technologies, does not mean that person is unwise. Wisdom is hard to define and navigate because it’s difficult to determine if someone is wise in something if you are not wise in that thing or do not have a comparison.

Treating smart differently

So, now we have a few definitions that complement smart. My goal with this post, like all posts, is to outline ways in which we can reframe the way that we think about an idea so that we can enhance our lives. We communicate orally and through our writings. More specific language that helps our audience better understand what we say enhances our communication skills. Not only this but also when we use more concrete language, we can sort people in our lives more easily.

Instead of wading through piles of resumes, dating profiles, and holiday cards that we don’t understand, we can throw away our assumptions and biases and come out with a better understanding of ourselves and with whom we are dealing. We can differentiate ourselves and how we navigate others by using more precise language. It is smart, intelligent, educated, and hopefully wise to more holistically define how we navigate relationships. If you’re looking for someone smart, you may end up with someone who you don’t want. Let us battle systemic biases and, as a parent would say to a toddler, use our words.