A good exercise, in every context, is this: assume the other side of everything you do is really, really smart. The “other side” could take a few forms: your boss or client; colleagues who will review your work; the people on the other side of the negotiating table from you; and even competitors or potential competitors.
Assuming the other side is really smart has tons of advantages, including these:
- It forces you to up your game, to do better work than you would have done otherwise.
- It forces you to not cut corners nor engage in any other behavior that a less sophisticated partner might miss but a sophisticated one will see.
- It prepares you for the times when they really are that good—so you won’t be caught off-guard.
The best part of this is that this attitude is really useful even when the other side isn’t smart. Why? The person you’re actually competing against is yourself, and by assuming the world is very smart, you just keep on improving yourself constantly.
One of the cases in which this is particularly useful is when the other side says or does something really stupid. Yes, that happens all the time. Some people are surrounded by idiots non-stop—and I’m not commenting on whether they actually are surrounded by idiots. That or they just have an inflated ego themselves that doesn’t correspond to reality, so they unfairly think everyone around them is an idiot. I’ll leave that up to you to decide!
But what happens when people around you say or do stupid things? Then they reveal to themselves that they are an idiot, so you can relax your standards, right?
Well, maybe. But here’s an alternate interpretation: role-playing is much, much more common than you imagine. Are they stupid or just saying stupid things to see how you react?
The answer may be that you’ll never know. So, it makes sense to always be prepared.
But there’s an even better version of this strategy. Imagine this other person isn’t just really smart. but you also want to impress him or her. This feels like a minor detail but it’s important. If you go into any situation where you want the smart person to be impressed with your work, you’ll likely do a much, much better job than you would otherwise. Ceteris Paribus, of course.
There’s an important qualification that’s worth keeping in mind: the difference between being “smart” and “informed” or framed negatively, “not-smart” and “uninformed.” Intelligence and Informedness are orthogonal: they have no relation to each other. Lots of really smart people know nothing about the topic at hand, and lots of stupid people know lots about it. So, when you talk to people as though they’re smart, make sure you don’t assume that they know anything about the issue you’re diving into.
