Once a great friend of mine said,” If you are not the smartest person in the team, you should leave the team.” I heaped praises on her filmy dialogue. One more colleague present there at the moment grinned in awe.
She explained,” If you are the smartest ,you have everything to give to others in the team and nothing to take and all the learnings stop .This is a complete loss scenario for him/her”. The conversation shifted to something else and we forgot about going deep dive into the dialogue.
However ,something about the learning suddenly hit me back and I could not hold back. Once my head gets fixated at something, I generally do not let it go, “ Is there nothing to learn really? Suppose you get into a complex project where there are new things to implement ,so as far as learning is concerned ,it does not matter if the other people are less smarter than you. There are new items to implement .”I paused and looked at them.
She returned it back ,”So, my definition of smartest person means he/she has implemented most of the things technically in his/her field and as far as his project is concerned ,is quite experienced in the technology stack and business domain followed there .If there is not around 60% new to implement ,he would find himself getting demotivated soon enough .Even if he manages to uphold his motivation, there would be hardly new things to learn.”
I replied,” But have not you seen that people surprise you. In my first project here, my manager was the smartest person and gradually I felt I filled the gaps between us. Some of the times, I came up with solutions that he did not think of at first. Therefore, he also learnt. May be in some of the cases, a person like me could topple my manager and then, he would become the smartest person not the manager.”
She was not a person to give up easily either. She had his arguments ,”But your manager to become one step behind the smartest consumed a lot of time – the same time if he would have invested in some other project , he would have much more things to learn.”
“That was a valid point. ”The third person was mostly enjoying playing the audience.
Could she be silent – no,no. She took a sip of coffee ,”But it is the death of the student and birth of the teacher. What if I never want to become a teacher? Going against one’s wishes – is that not equivalent to living unsatisfactory?”
Her points had weight behind it. For a moment ,it left me again confused - did she have the last laugh or there is someone who can comment and play along.