The 80th-floor Genius: Steve Jobs’ Definition of High Intelligence

Jeff Bezos says improve your ability to change your mind when you find better knowledge.

Elon Musk says, “It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree.”

According to Steve Jobs, A lot of [what it means to be smart] is the ability to zoom out, like you’re in a city and you could look at the whole thing from the 80th floor down at the city. And while other people are trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B reading these stupid little maps, you could just see it in front of you. You can see the whole thing.

The 80th-floor intelligence is like improving your “bird’s eye view” skills. First, you have to learn how to learn deeper and broader to accumulate experience and better knowledge.

You can only make better connections if you already have the right knowledge. So to improve your intelligence, gather more insight from great sources, choose your knowledge sources wisely, learn from people more intelligent than you, and read books you are willing to reread repeatedly.

• Improving your intelligence is about stacking experience and applying lessons from good sources. You can only zoom out if you know what you are looking at. It’s hard, but it’s worth it.
• Openness to wide and deep experiences outside your comfort zone will change your life. It will also improve your thinking lens.
• Intellectual curiosity is key to peak intelligence. It’s also one of the best predictors of success. Curiosity is at the core of scientific discoveries.

Your ability to spot better life and career patterns, make more brilliant connections and predict good outcomes depend on your ability to pause, zoom out and visualize the bigger picture.