The BlackBerry Problem | The Mistakes Series

Malcolm Gladwell· Host0:00

[gentle music] Pushkin. [upbeat music] It dawns on all of us at some point before adolescence that there is something called smart, and it is really rare. Only a small number of people are smart. And then a few years later, you have an even more important realization, which is that smart comes in many different varieties. I feel I spent my adolescence cataloging all the varieties of smart. There was my high school friend who had a mind that was a giant sponge that could soak up what seemed like an infinite amount of knowledge. Then I got to college. I met a guy whose thinking seemed effortless. He could be distracted or procrastinating or dancing at a party. It didn't matter. Somewhere in a back room in his brain was a giant computer that just quietly hummed along, solving one problem after another. Oh, then I had a friend who had a mind that she'd attached to a giant V8 with, like, eight hundred horsepower. I'd never seen smart attached to energy like that before. I spent a lot of time in college working on my taxonomy of smart, and along the way, I had a third realization, that every kind of exceptional intelligence has a downside, a price that person had to pay for being one of the chosen few. And every time I think of that third rule, I think of my