Wise words from my Grandpa

[In college] You will meet some of the smartest people you will ever meet and some of the dumbest. The smart ones will be able to apply their knowledge to life and the dumb ones will just have a piece of paper hanging on their wall. ~ Tom Gifford

 I have half written two other quote Monday blogs, but am not feeling either of them today. So you will get those in the near future, but for the time being you will have to deal with a quote from my grandpa.

To give some background on this quote, my grandpa (Tom Gifford) was a director of accounting for a steel company in Ohio. He was a very no nonsense type of guy who knew what he was looking for. He had a strong work ethic and expected everyone to hold the same ethics as he did.

Now to the quote.

He said this to my dad when he was entering college. This is a quote my dad has said to my brothers and I all the time and he even tells us that while we have entered the workforce. The quote in general just works and seems very basic, but it means so much more to me since I know the purpose on why my grandfather was giving this advice.

Being the Director of Accounting, my grandfather would hire accountants to be on his staff. One of the things that he considered to be a red flag was a student who had a 4.0 in college with all the honors a person could have with grades and no extracurricular activities.  If you had a 4.0 and no extracurricular activities that you were involved with, then he didn't want you. That was the sign that you were not a team player and were focusing on your own well being. But he would give the chance to the person who had solid grades and were involved in activities, because he knew you would be able to work in a team environment.

He also wanted to see if they would be able to relate to real world situations and not just examples from the book. My grandfather was in no way against education, in fact he very much promoted it and even worked his way through college after WWII to be able to provide for his family. He just knew that you needed more than books to be able to get the job done.

So what does that have to do with his quote?


It has everything to do with the quote and was part of the reason why I made sure I stayed active in college.

I needed to apply the knowledge I had in different areas and gain from other experiences. For example, when I started a young adult group I had to learn how to coordinate weekly meetings, come up with study ideas that later led to me bringing different materials to the group so people could experience it in different ways, I had to organize the weeks we cooked for the youth group and create menus and activities outside of our weekly meetings. It was a lot of work and seemed pretty daunting, especially since I was 19 when I started the group. The experience forced me to lead and think outside of the box.

Another example of something related to my field of study was when I joined the campus chapter of the American Marketing Association. This was useful to me since it was a group that was in my area of study. It had different meetings where we learned from marketing professionals and we would try to apply the knowledge by helping an organization. By having this experience, this helped bring the concept from the classes to actual examples and I chose to see the correlations.

That is what my grandfather means by smart. It is not being defines as having a high IQ or being able to remember vast amounts of information to spout out whenever it is needed, but to find the correlation. Smart to him was to actually be able to apply that knowledge you gained in the classroom to everyday situations. Being book smart is good and all, but actually applying the information shows the signs of a highly intelligent person.