Slightly Off KIlter

Rich has a friend who has this theory about people in High School… and the jobs they take when they grow up.

• The HS high achievers (most popular kids) — the ones on the debate team and the student council — grow up to be CEOs, startup-company starter-uppers, board chairmen, politicians
  
• The kids who followed (and tried to emulate) the high achievers, those in the “middle group” grow up to become managers, MBAs, marketing people, sales people.
  
• The nerdy ones grew up to become scientists, programmers, etc.
  

The reason programmers don’t get along with marketing people and PHBs is because we have never gotten along with them, ever since we were all 14 years old.

This all ties in well with an essay (by Paul Graham) entitled “Why Nerds are Unpopular”. The gist is that nerds aren’t so much unpopular now (now being the “real world” of work and programmers and marketing folks and used car salesmen) but why they (i.e. we 😉 were unpopular back then, in the world of High School.

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

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Why don’t smart kids make themselves popular? If they’re so smart, why don’t they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

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The answer, I think, is that they don’t really want to be popular.

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At the time I never tried to separate out my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was the more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn’t have taken it.

Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don’t think many nerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable. But most kids would take that deal. For half of them, it would be a step up. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who wouldn’t drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone?

And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.

If you were a “nerdy”, smart, unpopular kid in High School (or if you are now the parent of a nerdy, smart, unpopular kid in HS) you should read this essay. It explains a lot.

Not only that, it’s dead on target.