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The Importance of Life Smarts

Schools are excellent at teaching academic and book skills that work wonderfully well in the artificial realm of academia. However, people live in the real world, and what works in books often works much differently in the real world. Most of the world places a much higher value on academic knowledge, and very little, if any, value on life smarts. What this article terms as life smarts is often thought of as “street smarts” in the real world. This article should not be construed as saying that academic smarts are not useful; they are in fact very useful. But, schools have a large bias towards academic smarts and often present academic smarts as the only type of smarts out there, which is not the right thing to do.

Everybody that reads this article has a friend that is incredibly intelligent in terms of book smarts, but then is lost in the real world, as they seem to have no common sense that most other people possess. As an example, do schools ever teach someone how to handle being mugged or how to talk their way out of a confrontation at a bar? No, schools teach people not to do drugs because its “against the law” or not to commit suicide because everyone has some sort of wonderful potential. While these things are true, they are poor motivators and are not very helpful as an education of how to get out of the problems that can affect the lives of different people. Schools are gaining awareness and are moving in the right direction, but they place too high of an emphasis on following authority and rules because it's the good thing to do. After all, following the rules does not necessarily lead to the best outcome in life.

Life smarts are those smarts that unfortunately are not often taught to most people either at home or in school. How is an anxiety condition cured? Where does a person go to cure anxiety, alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicidal ideation? There is a multi factor solution to each and everyone one of these problems, and these problems can have a nasty side effect called death and yet not very much time is spent on educating people how to work through these difficulties.

The common solution to problems that is taught to males is typically a destructive behavior pattern that includes heavy drinking, fighting, or some other form of abuse of one's self or other people around him. Women are presented as the smarter of the two sexes, and while it does seem that they take care of themselves better than men on the average, it does seem that women are hardly perfect and probably do engage in destructive behavior as much as men, although the behavior is more subtle and passive, rather than overt.

One form of life smarts that is invaluable to gain is how to handle anxiety and recover from an anxiety condition to the point where one's life is the opposite of what it once was. That type of information is not taught anywhere. Sure, many people will acknowledge it is possible to live a life that is less impacted by anxiety, but to live a life the complete reverse of what it once was is nearly unthinkable. And yet, it seems to be the case that each and every person who puts his or her mind to living a better life can in fact live a better life if he or she commits to doing so. But, this topic receives very little, if any, air time in any publicly funded school system, and instead students are taught to think the way everyone else does – to be a politician, businessman, or some other sort of professional that does not fall too far outside the realm of mediocrity.

Life smarts are incredibly valuable and knowing what to do in life when problems hit is the most valuable knowledge one can possess, far more so than knowing the square root of the hypotenuse of a triangle is equal to the sum of the square roots of two legs of a triangle.

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