One huge reason experienced employees are so valuable to an organization is that no matter how smart you are—or how smart that whiz kid straight from the Ivy League with a computer science degree appears to be—the job-specific practical intelligence that comes from experience isn’t something you can teach. As an employee, you know things that you don’t know you know—all the assumed, background knowledge that allows you to smoothly navigate situations, even new situations, without being told what to do. Researchers call this practical intelligence. On the opposite end of the spectrum from your Oliver Twist–like practical intelligence is a computer (and that annoyingly peppy whiz kid). For example, imagine you’re telling a computer how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. In your human brain, you might understand that when you say “spread jelly,” you intend it to be done with the help of a knife or at the very least a spoon, but the computer does not. It has none of this knowledge that we assume to be mutually understood. Once the jelly is spread, you have to tell the computer to put the jelly slice and the peanut butter slice together so that the jelly comes into contact with the peanut butter; otherwise you might end up with an inside-out sandwich.
How many people do you know who are like this computer—with tons of computing power but without the practical intelligence to use it to their advantage? C’mon, we all know somebody. Or maybe this is one of those look-to-the-left, look-to-the-right moments and it’s you who has difficulty navigating the niceties of situations that others seem to skate through with ease. We all have a different amount of overall practical intelligence. As with IQ or creativity or height, you hold within you a measurable quantity of practical intelligence that makes you know how to handle things or not know how to handle things.
Each person also carries practical intelligence that is specific to situations. You may know that in the culture of your specific cluster of cubicles it’s okay to talk in ribald ways across the dividers about what did and didn’t happen this past weekend. Or you might know that in order to trim the number of unnecessary department meetings, it’s most productive to chat in the break room with the boss’s secretary, who will filter the opinion to the higher-ups, instead of going to the boss directly.
This is practical intelligence. And whereas intelligence depends on your conscious mind, practical intelligence depends in large part on your unconscious mind. Instead of intentionally learning things, you happen to pick things up; instead of learning explicitly, loading your practical intelligence depends on learning implicitly.
To speed it up, try moving practical intelligence from the unconscious to the conscious mind. Throughout this book, we’ll try to stay away from catchphrase movements that haven’t been through (or haven’t stood up to) the pokings and proddings of science. That said, it’s sure looking like mindfulness is more than a California/yoga/sushi fad. Basically, mindfulness is the difference between just sitting in front of the TV eating a package of Double Stuf Oreo cookies and sitting in front of the TV eating cookies while being aware of what you are doing and why. It’s not that mindfulness forbids or ensures any specific behavior; it just means that you can be less led by the ring in the nose of your subconscious into doing, thinking, feeling, and believing things that your conscious self would rather not.
When you examine your actions instead of simply performing them, you have the opportunity to bring to the foreground of your mind things that would usually be left in the background. You have the opportunity to make implicit things explicit and to use your intelligence to boost your practical intelligence. You want to learn how? Keep reading.
Mindfulness and Practical Intelligence
Now we’re in the weeds of interconnected things that are given different names but are all mushed up together, including practical intelligence, emotional intelligence, cultural intelligence, and more. For every one of these somewhat imprecise terms, there’s a study showing that mindfulness trains it. Here’s one way to practice. Ask yourself what background knowledge a computer would need in order to accomplish one of your tasks at work. What would the computer need to know in order to talk with your nonprofit’s donors? Or your boss? Or the little people? What is the work equivalent of knowing to put the peanut butter side of the bread in contact with the jelly side of the bread? And then, just as important, ask why that’s the case. By using mindfulness to make your implicit learning explicit, you can harvest more practical intelligence from these situations that require knowing without knowing.