Not exclusive of being good at anything else. One grows tired of people treating you like you can’t do anything “practical” right because “of all that college.” In many instances (some lately), certain folks have actually gotten bossy with me in the context of us being peers because they assumed that I could not accomplish the task at hand because I spent my 20s studying philosophy. Hmm. Turned out that I knew how to do it better in several instances, and it was completely unrelated to school.
I want to smack everyone who throws around the term “Book Smart.”
Usually such folks are either not “book smart” and feel the need to justify their inability to understand books, or they are only “book smart” and feel the need to justify not being good at other things.
Guess what? If you can ONLY do one thing, you’re not SMART at all! Animals and machines can be good at one thing.
That said, I don’t actually know more than a handful of people who are only good at one thing. Folks just pigeon-hole themselves into not exploring other things they might be good at. A lot of the “book smart” people I know could probably master outdoor skills if they went camping and, well, had to. And a lot of the people I know who do not consider themselves “book smart” but can rebuild things and who understand how things work would probably understand Aristotle better than some of my less giften classmates over the years, if they tried to read it.
Maybe we need to redefine what we mean by SMART as a culture?