The Highest Form of Intelligence

I think the highest form of intelligence is creating a life we actually want to live.

But think about how our day actually runs. We wake up at a certain time, we eat the same six or eight things on rotation, we drive the same way to the same job, we talk to the same handful of people, and we run the same loop of thoughts we’ve been running since we got out of school.

And if we really go deep on this, none of it was a decision. It just sort of happened. It accumulated. Our parents set the defaults before we could even make a choice. School installed a few more. Then our friends, our job, the internet, and ten thousand moments of taking the path of least resistance filled in everything else.

We’re living in a house somebody else built, and we’ve spent our adult years moving the couch around, calling that freedom.

Look for a second at how we get measured.

We get measured by money and test scores and that little glass plaque from the company dinner that goes straight onto the shelf. Being good at the specific stuff other people decided to measure makes us feel good about ourselves. How weird is that? Somebody else built the house, and somebody else is grading the housework.

So many of us run hard in a direction we think we’re supposed to go, and then we wake up at 40 or 50 in a life we never picked, doing a job we fell into, surrounded by a default set of people and circumstances. We might even be successful on the surface. People might even call us smart.

But are we? Really?

Shouldn’t we be figuring out what kind of life we actually want, and then go build that? Isn’t that the highest form of intelligence? Wouldn’t you say the person who can do that is smarter than someone with more money or more stuff or more success?

Yeah. I would, for sure.

So if the house got built without us, the answer was never a better couch arrangement.

The answer is becoming the builder.

And when I think about what a builder of a life actually works on, two things tower over everything else.

The first is the people around us, and what happens to them when they spend time with us. Do they feel light or heavy when they walk away? Do they feel connected to us? Did we make them better?

Harvard has been running a study on this since 1938, following the same families across entire lifetimes to figure out what actually makes a life feel good, and the answer keeps coming back the same. Your life is basically as good as your relationships. The biggest single input into whether a life feels great is the quality of the people in it, and the quality of what we build in them.

So the question I keep asking myself is, am I a builder of men and women? Do I recognize the good in people and tell them?

I was talking to my boys this morning, and I said I think most people are walking around with cups half full. They get dinged up by the world. They don’t think they’re good enough, smart enough, sexy enough, rich enough. They don’t think they’re enough. We’ve talked about this enoughness problem before, and it’s a huge one, man.

But if God actually made us in his image, then we aren’t walking around half empty. We have a part of God inside of us, which means we don’t have scarcity, we have abundance. The cup should be overflowing. And when we’re overflowing, our energy touches every single person who comes into contact with us, and every person we meet becomes a chance to lay a brick in somebody. One honest word at a time.

A builder of men and women, brick by brick.

That’s how a life gets better. We stop rearranging our own furniture and start building people.

And then the big one. The relationship with God.

This is the part where some people lean in and some people close the tab, and either way is OK. But I can’t write honestly about building a life and leave this out, because for me it’s the foundation everything else sits on.

Are we a Sunday God person or an every single day God person? Are we scared of God or comfortable with God? Do we laugh with God, or do we only cry with God? Do we only show up when things are wrong? Do we pray only when we need something?

If we’re honest, most Christians are Sunday God Christians, and maybe even Sunday morning God Christians. By the time we’re leaving the parking lot, we’re already thinking about the next thing.

A few years ago, I noticed I’d built a wall between me and God. And that’s the strange thing about being a builder. Nobody hands us a blueprint, and if we’re not paying attention, we build anyway. I was making decisions in my life, consciously and unconsciously, that put this big wall up, course by course, year by year. I never wanted it. It was just a slow pileup of how I was living and the stuff I let slide. And then one day I realized, I feel distant. I feel separate from God. Like he’s in this other room and I’m over here.

And I decided, and this was a choice, I’m taking this wall down. I want to be in the presence of God at all times.

The decision was instant. The change took a couple of years, and it’s still compounding. The peace and the comfort and the connection showed up and they stayed. I talk to God every day now, the highs and the lows, the good and the bad. I ask for his protection around me and my family and my friends. I say a simple prayer when I wake up in the morning, and some days I say it three or four more times before dinner.

Thank you, God. Thank you, Jesus. I love you. Please send an army of angels with ridiculous strength, courage, wisdom, and positivity to set up camp in my heart and help guide my decisions. Amen.

Notice I threw the word ridiculous in there. I believe in angels, and I believe God created some of them to be ridiculously strong and smart and courageous, and those are the ones I want camped around me, lifting me up.

I don’t know how to quite put my finger on it, but there’s an internal confidence now, a belief that’s changed my life over the past couple of years. That direct connection to God, I think it’s made all the difference.

So tomorrow morning, before the defaults kick in, I want us to stand in the middle of our own lives for a minute and look around the way a builder looks at a house.

Whose floor plan is this? Who picked these rooms? Which walls did we mean to build, and which ones just accumulated while we weren’t paying attention? And what would we build here, starting today, if we actually believed we were allowed to?

Because we are allowed to. That’s the whole point. Forget the money and the test scores and the plaques for a second. The smartest person any of us will ever know is whoever looked at the house they were handed and decided to become the builder.

I think a part of us is perfect. We’ve got to start listening to that part, that higher self, that true self. And when we start living from that part, we finally put the couch down and pick up the tools.