By Evans Tu (President & CEO, SYNNEX Group)

Smart people possess a number of advantages. To begin with, they are creative in general as they are solidly logical, exquisitely thoughtful and highly intellectual. They tend to believe nothing is insoluble thanks to their strong creativity and comprehension. As a result, they gradually perceive that they can easily sort out problems without making too much effort.

Given the belief that they are efficient learners, smart people unconsciously develop a snobbish attitude towards other co-workers. They are sometimes even unwary of their impatience and excessive pride to their supervisors, and they ultimately exude an air of arrogance.

Smart people have the edge primarily due to their strong logical-reasoning ability. However, there exists a large gap between having a strong logic and accomplishing an actual task.

First of all, logical reasoning is a static mechanism, and is based on the presumption that the external world is immutable. By contrast, performing an actual task is considered a dynamic procedure, in which two barely predictable elements -- “the human factor” and “the environment” -- have to be considered. With respect to both elements, factors related to the former are actually far from simple compared with the latter. People who were raised in various backgrounds tend to form different personalities, responding to situations with different approaches mentally, emotionally and behaviorally. A person would even make different responses to the same situation in different venues or occasions, let alone in times when people turn irrational, making the situation more unpredictable and uncontrollable. What appears to be logically feasible would likely become very complicated and difficult after the variables involving the human factor and the environment are taken into consideration.

How does one develop dynamic practical experiences? In fact, experience is accumulated as one goes through various incidents over a long period of time. That is to say, pragmatism represents an agglomeration of personal experiences and observations, which requires a long period of time to cultivate for which there is no shortcut.

Some smart people, who are aware of their tendency to assume that ” everything is easy ” , also show an eagerness to be molded in a practical world and accumulate practical experiences. However, before they could develop a strong sense of pragmatism, they would usually back out of the experience-building process due to their habit of pursuing “speed” in handling matters and would unconsciously return to their old way of “logical reasoning”.

To avert the aforementioned situation, smart people who seek to accumulate practical experience can try to establish an alarm system, wherein they must view it as a warning signals whenever they start to “know” things and constantly remind themselves that “it should not be that easy” and that they should persevere through a deliberately lengthened experience-building process, they will eventually solidly extend their practical exposure, and be able to adjust the habit of being overly-dependent on logical reasoning.

At best, smart people who are unrealistic only attain moderate accomplishment; there are even those who are pretty much unfulfilled. People will have the chance to become outstanding if they can be both smart and practical. They can try to check whether they dwell too much on the theoretical aspect in the process of learning. They must deliberately pay more attention to the “human factor” and “the environment”. By doing so, they will be capable of balancing the ability to conduct logical reasoning and build practical experience. This is also one way that smart people can enhance their level of competence.