Growing up, I had the causal chain of life goals below drilled into my head. I am sure kids elsewhere can relate to this too, and hopefully it’s not universal.

Brains => ??? => Money and benefits => Food, clothing, shelter, car, washing machine => Societal approval => Success!

In this DAG, ??? is a black box of education and profession choices to bridge talent with financial success. For some children, parents make these choices. If your parents are surgeons, you’re just expected to be one. (But hey, you can be wacky and choose your specialty!) For others, and this was my experience, there’s little to no practical guidance for figuring out ??? and still all of the same pressure to succeed. This happens when parents/family who lack professional success or role models funnel unmet desires and intensities into their children.

Regardless of the child’s starting position, here are the main valid careers that are part of ??? in Bangladeshi society:

  • Physicians
  • Engineers
  • Corporate executives
  • Diplomats (Foreign Service, UN, etc.)
  • Bankers

(It’d be interesting to track the rise and fall of respectability and prestige for different occupations. For example, in Bangladesh, why are lawyers and judges not as respectable as they used to be 50 years ago? So many public intellectuals were British-educated jurists. A quick answer is probably institutional corruption that destroyed goodwill for the legal field, interacted with a secular growth in demand for people trained in the hard sciences.)

Here’s how I internalized the first part of the chain, what I consider South Asian society’s definition of intelligence in my time. There was no notion of innate versus learned intelligence. Sure, we accept that some people were adept at picking up math or language faster than others. But that was not an acceptable excuse for everybody else. The popularity of tutoring centers (Kumon being perhaps the most famous example in the West) demonstrates that many parents firmly believe that intelligence can be bought and drilled into children.

How does one prove their smarts? I was taught these are the necessary and sufficient signals, in descending order of importance:

  • Straight-A student with a solid work ethic to justify the grades
  • Graduate education in STEM in a Western university
  • Merit scholarships achieved throughout scholastic career
  • Wordly, displayed through travel and familiarity with international current events
  • Has extensive knowledge of trivia

Some non-South Asians are surprised at hearing about the last two. Then I am surprised at their reaction until I reflect more on it. Knowing something about everything signaled curiosity and intelligence but nothing more specific about ability than that. Yet somehow we bundled it with signs like alma mater and degrees. My pet theory is that we gleaned at least some part of wordliness from colonial British society ideals. If you aspire to administer land and people in a globe-straddling empire, you should espouse a generalist approach to life and probably sound like the Economist magazine.

Let’s take these traits at face value and think about those excluded from the intelligence list:

  • Passion for fine arts, music, history, poetry, etc.
  • Introspectiveness
  • Any interest in physical activity

As an adult, I still get confused looks from family members when I share interests in areas that won’t necessarily get me a job. My mother’s reaction is emblematic of others: why don’t you just watch TV or nap?

I asked my US-born wife, Allison, if American society has similar heuristics and behavioral traits in an attempt to recognize intelligence. She thinks the ability to conduct research on complex topics and then communicate ideas in TED-talk-style accessible ways as one possibly popular measure of ability.

I am sure that neither my nor Allison’s experience is representative of our countries or all of our cultures. South Asians growing up in the US today in a rich household have, for better or worse, entirely different expectations imposed on them. Perhaps intelligence is not emphasized as much as other inputs (money, network, etc.).

I’d love to hear from other folks and learn their archetypes around brains and success. Please reach out with your ideas and their origin stories. These ideas are powerful and shape our choices, relationships and outcomes.Engaging with them could teach us something about ourselves.