# What intelligence really means

- **Episode:** [16](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/16.md) (2022-12-13)
- **Type:** other
- **Tags:** intelligence, definition, success
- **Time:** 5:00–11:49 (start 300s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/16?t=300](https://truthliesandwork.com/16?t=300)

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[5:00] Leanne Elliott: It does. And, and before we kind of dive into that period of your life, you, you said there that you were, you were not good looking, you're not particularly intelligent, you weren't popular. Where does this kind of self-deprecation come from?
[5:16] Al Elliott: I honestly don't think it is. I think it's just practical. Um, I— my brother is a professor, very, very clever. And so obviously, naturally, with being 2 boys in the family, you kind of— you are pitted against one another to a certain extent, or compared, I suppose, is more likely. And then I remember some of my earliest memories where, where, um, there was a, a girl called Eleanor who was in my class, um, and my mum kept going, right, what's— what did Eleanor get in this test? And what did you get in this test? It's like, well, why didn't you get what Eleanor got? And, um, so there was a lot of this sort of, um, competition to be intelligent, um, which I wasn't able to— to— well, I wasn't able to— to win as much as my brother did. Um, now I think I've got intelligence in other— certainly other things. Academically, no. But in terms of other stuff, definitely. I feel like I'm very good at picking up, seeing patterns, or seeing ideas, which is, again, takes me on to entrepreneurship. So I, I don't think it's self-deprecating. I honestly think now in my 40s, I look back and I'm like, yeah, this is just practical. That's just how it was. Perhaps at the time I felt terrible, but now I don't. I'm just like, okay, that was just the fact
[6:25] Leanne Elliott: What does intelligence mean to you?
[6:28] Al Elliott: I'm not sure necessarily that you can define intelligence using just one sort of criteria, because intelligence in warfare, for example, is very different to intelligence in a university, which is very different to intelligence in if you're leading a massive team, which is very different to intelligence if you're starting a new business, you know. So I don't think you can say someone isn't— you can say I've got a universal, universal measure of intelligence, even though I'm sure psychologists do, and I'm pretty sure that's IQ. But, but I would say, I would, I would argue that intelligence is probably within your domain. Do you have intelligence? Do you know things that other people don't? Um, so if we, if we talk about intelligence in terms of like Secret Service and spy stuff and all that. The intel they talk about in James Bond, well, that's the intelligence about a particular domain, isn't it? About a particular— about particular people. So I think maybe intelligence is often very domain-specific, and someone who would appear very intelligent as a university professor, for example— I'm trying to take the most extreme example— would, would appear really stupid to someone who managed a team of 10,000 people, or who started a business, or Elon Musk, for example, 2 very different intelligences, I think
[7:44] Leanne Elliott: You mentioned that you were often compared to your brother, and it wasn't kind of a game you could win. Do you think that played a role in, in you going into business, being an entrepreneur?
[7:58] Al Elliott: Yeah, maybe. I honestly hadn't really thought about it like that before. Yeah, in my family, that wasn't a game I could, I could win. Whereas in my family, there was no one really who was an entrepreneur. So even if I was a shit one, I'd still be the best entrepreneur in the family. So yeah, I never really thought about it like that. But yes, potentially. Yeah
[8:19] Leanne Elliott: Are you competitive?
[8:20] Al Elliott: I don't think I am particularly competitive. We have a monthly quiz with, with my family and with your family, and I am always last in it. Like, they get an average of like 8 points and I get 3. So, and that doesn't bother me at all. What does get me excited is when I see an opportunity in something, and I think not many people have, have seen this opportunity, and even fewer people are actually acting on it. So that's where I would become competitive, but not because I have to win like Type A personality, just more because the excitement of being able to bring something to life that hasn't existed before
[9:03] Leanne Elliott: Yeah
[9:05] Al Elliott: is incredible. So I suppose I'm competing against time rather than people, in that I like to be— I like to create things that either haven't existed before or have existed but aren't great. And so that's why I got into coding as well, because it's maybe about sort of— I started programming when I was a kid in BASIC. But if I started in PHP about 15 years ago, and I was rubbish for about 8 years of it, and then I started getting better and better and better. And what really excites me about that is that you can sit down And within a day, you can have produced something that other people can access and use that's never existed before. Or you can see something that exists and you go, that's not very good, I can improve that. And I don't have to go and find a huge tech team to do it because I can create a proof of concept in a couple of days. And that's what I like. So I suppose I see coding very much like Lego or like woodwork where If you want, if you can imagine something existing, like I remember when I was, when I was living with my brother in Bradford, we built a cabin bed, a bunk bed. And so we just sat there and we're like, okay, let's design it, let's, let's go and cut the wood. And, and so within 3 or 4 days, a space that was unusable in a tiny bedroom suddenly became this place with a desk underneath it. And then it sounds like children here, and then a bed above it. And we created that and we created from nothing
[10:25] Leanne Elliott: Yeah
[10:25] Al Elliott: So I suppose I'm not competitive with other people, but I am competitive with myself in that I want to produce something that I'm proud of before, I suppose, before I get bored of it and move on to something else. So that's probably my time constraint. Probably what I'm competing against is if you were to graph my interest over time, then I'm working so hard to stay in the first third of that quadrant of that graph before it starts to plateau and then dip
[10:54] Leanne Elliott: Yeah
[10:55] Al Elliott: And then it just never gets built
[10:56] Leanne Elliott: Is that a pattern that, that is quite familiar to you then?
[10:59] Al Elliott: 100%
[11:01] Leanne Elliott: The—
[11:02] Al Elliott: I think— I'm not sure there's many things that I've finished. I've started lots of things. And what, what is funny is that, is that I, I meet a lot of people who, who say they've got great ideas and they never do anything about them. And I always think it's ridiculous. You could have a website up by this afternoon. You go into, like, a landing page website this afternoon. You can be running ads by tomorrow. You could have started this. Yet people who look at me when I started something and then haven't finished it probably think exactly the same thing. Like, you're a flipping idiot. Why have you— why have you got this far and got this much momentum and then just given up? So it's definitely something that I'm really bad at. I get excited about opportunities, excited about proof of concept, and then my interest almost falls off a cliff because I'm like, oh, let's go and build something new