When are you smart enough?

So I watched this video today and it got me thinking about how valuable intelligence and long-term vision are.  This guy was literally laughed at numerous times on numerous tv shows by numerous famous people and yet he continued to make his point.  To do that you either have to be terribly cocky or you really grok the topic you’re taking such a firm stance on.  It’s becoming more and more rare to run into people that know a lot about anything.  People have lots of general knowledge, but little specific knowledge.

I’ve had many a chat over the years about the fact that my grandparents generation was the last generation of people in the US that knew how the things around them worked.  If my grandpa was using a tractor, he knew how every part of it worked or at least knew enough about it that if it failed he could repair it.  My generation does not know that.  When things break, we throw it away or re-install it.  To truly understand something you have to know how to build it and Americans don’t build much anymore.  A handful of people automate repetitive or difficult tasks and then other people build on top of that automation and soon enough you end up with a task that no one actually knows how to do.

I am not saying this is a bad thing in all cases.  Much more can get done when you eliminate the tedium of tasks you’re not interested in.  What concerns me is people’s lack of desire to know of how anything works.  It often seems like it is fashionable to be naive.  I don’t get why it isn’t cool to know a lot about a lot of things.  In any case, Peter Schiff, the guy in the video, is a badass.  I’ve seen lots of comments written about him where people say things like, “I wish I had his crystal ball.”  What those people fail to understand is that he doesn’t need one.  He has such a fundamentally powerful understanding of financials coupled with common sense that it appears to others that he can see into the future.  Guys like this inspire me to always be curious and always keep learning. They remind me that the answer to the title of this post is a definitive “never”.