I Don’t Pray for My Kids to be Smart

I just watched a Ted talk by Angle Lee Duckworth and decided to jump to my laptop and write this article cause I felt it so relevant to my belief and experience, thus suddenly want to share. She mentioned about how Grit (patience and perseverance) play an important factor for a good outcome on top of IQ.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that IQ, or born as a smart person, is one of the keys to be success. In fact, many researches showed that it has high relation with work performance. However, I not part of those outstanding groups of people. Both my previous IQ test in kindergarten and high school put my brain performance as “Average score”. This explains why I always struggle with Math across my education level. While in career, I always amaze by many colleagues or bosses who can “calculate on the fly” very fast and precise, while it always takes some time for me.

Of course, the judgment and the fact made me sad. I did think, at that time, the God was so unfair to let someone born with a better brain than others. However, and unfortunately, blaming Him will not make me smarter. I accept the fact that “genius” is not my competitive edge thus, I developed my own strategy, a “better preparation”. Most of its application nothing but work harder, be prepared and be patient to achieve our desired outcome. Just to give an example, Anyone can ask office boy in Mayora how many times they busted me train my slides and oral fluency prior every quarterly presentation in the early morning, or how I have to stay overnight to prepare the content that provides good storytelling.

When I reflecting back to today, many of my milestones due to more on this patience and perseverance instead of IQ. The overseas career in India and pursuing MBA in Nanyang are two examples that a long dream that can be materialized with years of process and belief. So that, I also encourage everyone that it’s okay not to have high IQ, instead by acknowledging the lack, drives us to be good on others aspect.

That’s why my prayer for my kids is not to be smart, but instead to be foolish and always prepared.