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The Way I Think > Chapter 12: Emotional
Intelligence and Social Skills
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One of my friends at Wheaton talked about how his girlfriend spoke English nearly perfectly -- he could only remember hearing her make mistakes of any kind twice; she didn't even make the mistakes usually made by most speakers. What made this particularly remarkable was that English was not her first language, or even her second. It was something like her third or fourth.
Her proficiency in English serves as a useful analogy for what social skills can be among the extraordinarily intelligent. The bad news is that social skills aren't a first language to many of the brightest minds. (There is a lot of truth to the stereotype of the maladapted genius.) The good news is that they have the talent to attain a high degree of proficiency in a third or fourth language.
The program I would set forth is as follows, in the order that they occurred to me (not order of logical priority, which is not clear to me):
1: So far as you can, pursue emotionally healthy friendships with others where you have a lot in common. One or two good friendships is worth a lot. 'Emotionally healthy' takes precedence to 'your own intellectual level', but they are both important. If you have one or two people with whom you can share whatever interests you without worry about it sailing over their heads, you have in diminutive form the context in which most people naturally develop social skills without ever consciously thinking, "I need to develop social skills." This may be hard, but if you can do it, it's a wonderful benefit.
2: Read books that talk about emotional intelligence and social skills; several titles are listed in the bibliography.
3: Apply what you have read in dealing with people in general. As with a great many other things outlined in here, practice, practice, practice! Practice is a key to success in many things. You might seriously consider, for a time, working in a socially oriented profession: camp counselor, engineer, help desk, manager, and sales associate are a few that come to mind. Not all of them will be delightful -- help desk is also known as Hell desk -- but they will all contribute to your education. Michael Valentine Smith, in Stranger in a Strange Land, had a rather eccentric education, and the kinds of things that educated him might educate you a lot more than Harvard.
I will not try to say much about emotional intelligence specifically, because of the quality of existing writings on that topic. They have flaws (Daniel Goleman seems to want to replace the "intelligence is everything" myth, which simply isn't true, with an "emotional intelligence is everything" myth, which is equally untrue), but if read attentively and critically, they provide a deep insight into a companion area of inquiry to the contents of the present book.
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