12d • Journal Entries
Intellectual Intelligence
Journal Entry
I had an interesting conversation with Charlie yesterday. Charlie Martinez is a great guy and he’s been helping produce our album. He was a soundman for Steely Dan for hundreds of shows, and we were talking about Walter Becker and Skunk Baxter and all the characters that came in and out during his tenure with that group among others. We always get a kick out of his current role doing front of house sound for Roger Earl’s Foghat, which is amazing when you think about it. An eighty year old drummer still smashing it out there every night. That alone gives you hope for the future of the music business. It tells you something about what happens when you stick it out because you’re genuinely having a blast doing what you do. There’s a whole lesson in that by itself, but that wasn’t even what we were really getting into.
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What we were really circling was the idea of true intelligence. What does it even mean. Not from one angle, but from every angle you can think of. There’s mental intelligence and physical intelligence. There’s holistic intelligence. Musical intelligence. Perceptive intelligence. Spiritual intelligence. Even paranormal intelligence if you want to go there. When you start listing them all out it gets overwhelming fast because there are so many flavors of the thing that it becomes nearly impossible to pin down what intelligence actually is at its core. Which type is the truest form. Which one matters most.
But we did agree on one thing, and it’s something we kept circling back to throughout the whole conversation. Real intelligence produces happiness. Or to put it more simply, if you are truly intelligent, you should be joyful. That’s the signal. That’s the evidence. Not the degrees on the wall or the vocabulary you can throw around, but the joy that radiates from a person who has figured something out about how to live. Some even call it what the French call joie de vivre. That pure, almost effortless enjoyment of being alive. And it made me think for a minute about what that actually represents in my own life.
Because here’s the thing. Instant happiness is fleeting. Just standing around being happy doesn’t really compute unless you’ve got some rare wiring in your brain. There’s always something pulling you off the mountaintop. A bill, a phone call, a worry, a distraction. That’s just the physical condition of being a human being. Happiness as a static state is basically impossible to sustain. So if real intelligence is supposed to produce joy, what kind of joy are we actually talking about.
And that’s when the thought shifted for me. If real intelligence is connected to joy, then maybe the truest form of that intelligence is tied to how many other people you can make happy. Not just yourself. Because when you start making others happy, the effect is kinetic. It multiplies. You’re creating happiness in someone else and in the process you’re generating it for yourself. It compounds. It’s not one to one. It’s one to many, bouncing back in ways you can’t even predict. So I started sitting with that idea. True intelligence might actually be measured by how much happiness you can create for other people.
But then the practical side of my brain kicked in. Unless you’re a comedian working all day every day or an ultra wealthy philanthropist writing checks around the clock, how could that possibly work for a normal person. How do you operationalize joy for other people in a way that actually fits inside a real life.
And that’s where the studio came in. I was recording with Charlie and we were doing the fifth or sixth take on a vocal. Each song was being pieced together part by part, lined up so there was cohesiveness between the vocal lines and the structure of the song. We were going through each take and each section, learning as we went about what worked and what didn’t in this spot or that spot. As we got further into the song and started putting the puzzle pieces together, things began to gel. We started to hear the whole picture forming. And eventually, after all the labor and all the iteration, we arrived at the best version of all the parts stitched together. It was labor intensive, no question. But it was deeply rewarding because of the effort that went in. And because at the end of it, the result was this combination of learning and skill all mixed together with a certain level of feel and instinct for how to make the song truly sing.
And then it just clicked. It was so simple it almost felt stupid. The way to make other people happy is to teach them the things I know. That’s it. It’s really about educating on the success I’ve had. Building an enterprise out of thin air. Growing it to multimillion dollar scale. Running a company. Knowing all the things I’ve learned over the last couple of decades about how to do the things I’ve done in my world of sales and marketing and business. For some reason standing there in that studio I thought about my entire wingspan of experience and realized I have never once made a course or a curriculum out of the things I’ve done. It was genuinely dumbfounding to think about. Because I talk about this stuff all day long when we work with clients to help them get their businesses straightened out. I live inside this knowledge every single day. But I’ve never committed to putting it down into a structured, workable curriculum that someone could follow from start to finish. I’ve thought about it plenty of times over the years but never pulled the trigger because I was never looking at it from this angle.
And now the whole thing connects. If intellectual intelligence is about producing joy, and producing joy comes from making other people’s lives better, and the clearest way I can make other people’s lives better is by teaching them the things I’ve spent decades learning the hard way, then my own intellectual intelligence should actually grow in the process. By connecting with others. By structuring the knowledge. By coincidence of being able to educate and help people build their businesses and change their outcomes through the relationship of shared experience and applied learning, I should by default become happier myself. Because I’m connecting the dots for other people to do things more efficiently, more effectively, more confidently. And that energy comes right back.
Now I just have to go map this whole thing out. And honestly, it might just be the fun I’ve been looking for.
Lesson Learned
The smartest thing a person can do with what they know is give it away. Intelligence that stays locked inside one skull is just trivia. Intelligence that reaches out and changes how someone else thinks, plans, builds, or lives is something else entirely. When you teach what you’ve earned through years of doing the work, you stop hoarding and start multiplying. And the strange reward of that equation is that the person doing the teaching ends up happier than the person hoarding the knowledge ever could be. Joy is not something you manufacture for yourself. It’s a byproduct of being useful to other people at a level that actually changes their trajectory. If you’ve been sitting on decades of hard won knowledge and never structured it into something others can follow, today might be the day to start drawing the map. Not because you owe it to anyone. But because the happiness you’ve been looking for might be hiding inside the thing you already know how to do.
If true intelligence is measured not by what you know but by how you use it—how are you applying your knowledge today to create something that lasts?
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Intellectual Intelligence
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