Smartest Person in the Room

There are a lot of us humans that think we are the smartest person in the room wherever we go.  It may be an illusion or it may be the truth.  The thing is that thinking that is a huge hazard!  What happens is that we begin to think everyone else is stupid and then the way we interact with them is condescending.  That does NOT make us popular.

I know a lot about this problem since I was told over and over as a kid that my best trait was that I was smart.  Somehow I translated that to mean that I was smarter than everybody else.  I was wrong about that, for sure.  Plus I learned that people are at different levels of smartness, but everybody knows and understands stuff that other people don't.  I've also learned to be patient with the other smartest people in the room who are shocked to find out that I don't know as much as they do.