A long time ago in a secluded chamber, someone made a decision on what it meant to be smart and what it meant to be stupid. This ancient preachment set the distinction for "good" and "bad" not just in academe, but in the halls of our homes and offices. If you were a clever student who learned in traditional Horace Mann linear frames and colored within the lines, you were rewarded with good grades; labeled a promising student. If on the other hand, you learned differently and were not a traditional student you were at best, judged as an under-achiever; at worst, written off as dull or learning-impaired.
 
Consider an acquaintance named Jonathon Mooney. Framed as a hopeless under-achiever by his school system, crushed by the double burden of Attention Deficit Disorder andDyslexia, Mooney was an inconvenience to his faculty and counselors. With each passing school year, Jonathon and his beleaguered mother fought for the right to salvage his tortured academic experience from the failed monopoly known as K-12 education. Though discouraged at every turn, Mrs. Mooney gave no quarter; a woman on a monomaniac's mission to keep her son from falling into the abyss of the forgotten.
 
She worked late into the night dragging her son through endless homework assignments, projects and exams. None of her efforts spent in this forever-never twilight zone seemed to help. She was in fact, playing for time. One day during Jonathon Mooney's early middle school years, she was asked to report to the counseling office to discuss her son's travails. Counselor: "Mrs. Mooney, I'm afraid we've reached the limit of what we can do for your son...he may need to consider an alternative to our school." The guidance counselor would have been well advised to remember the ancient incantation that says, "Never scratch a Tiger with a short stick."
 
Without raising her voice, Mrs. Mooney replied with the steely eyed resolve of a Navy Seal, that her son would indeed remain in "their school," and would be entitled to all resources stipulated by the best-practices of public education. It was a short colloquy, but one that was unmistakable. Somehow, Jonathon Mooney's relentless mother salvaged her son's dignity, reversing twelve tenuous years of public education wherein some students are routinely taught to dislike themselves.
 
Jonathon Mooney graduated cum laude with Ivy League honors from venerable Brown University, then penned a book (Learning Outside the Lines). Today Mooney speaks to teachers, parents, and anyone aware of the perils of mistaking conventional learning with true intelligence.
 
"Do you see that janitor down at the end of the hall, working the night shift?" he asks his audience. "Do you know who put him there? We did. He wasn't 'bright' or seen as a person with promise. He fell through the cracks. Maybe he'd have made a great teacher."

You may ask, "What does this have to do with my daily universe?" Short answer: everything. The people we dismiss on first-pass as "under-achieving" could in fact be among our most gifted. The old school views on what's smart, what's not, need to give way to the willing suspension of disbelief. We're far better off discovering hidden aptitude, than to witness it first hand when our "just-average" employee becomes our competitor's super star.