If You Want to Be Smart, You Must Do This

There are lots of smart people.

There are not a lot of people who can do this smart thing.

The poet John Keats called it “negative capability” — the mental fortitude to be able to entertain multiple contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. Or as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing…