>>14141162I don't mean striving as in trying to improve their life or doing entrepreneur shit or whatever. It's often little things. Like imagine a job where everyone works this shitty old machine that makes an annoying rattle when its in operation. It's done this for years and none of the workers question that it's going to do that. They have a whole litany of excuses: it's not their job to care, it works fine anyway, they're afraid to mess something up, the machine is too complex for them to understand.
Then an person is hired that has high intelligence. They don't settle for that; they are compelled by their capabilities to apply it wherever there is a problem. While performing their job, they also take time to check the machine, learn how it works from the ground up not just how to use it, maybe look up some schematics or ask the higher-up employees how it works. In the end, they find that tightening one nut somewhere stops the entire thing from rattling. To that person, it's a simple, easy, thirty-second fix that improves things for everyone. To everyone else, it may as well have been witchcraft because they were not only incapable of understanding the complex interactions that were causing the problem, but because they are so dumb they don't even try.
The way I define intelligence is like that. The capability to break down problems, understand them, and then solve them. That can be an engineering problem, a logic problem, a social problem, an abstract (mathematical or philosophical) problem, or whatever else. Stupid people see a black box that is beyond them. Intelligent people see a flow-chart of smaller, interconnected problems and can trace out the real issue, often very quickly and easily.
