On Being a Mid-Wit (🫵 You Are) and What To Do About It

There’s a meme I love called the mid-wit meme.

In this meme, there is a bell curve of intelligence from 55 IQ up to 145 IQ.

On the left side of the curve, there are the low-wits. The low-wit is depicted as a caveman-looking character with a big forehead and blank stare on his face.

In the middle, there are the average intelligence people, the mid-wits. The mid-wit is depicted as a frustrated, crying guy.

And on the right, there are the high-wits. The high-wit is depicted as a Jedi.

This meme gets applied to every area of life such as personal finance, health, investing, and happiness.

While it’s humorous, the meme is profound (at least to my low-wit brain) and worth thinking about on a deeper level.

We as humans respect intelligence. We admire people on the right side of the bell curve like Einstein. And if we’re being honest, we’d all like to have brains that remembered things a little better and processed information a little quicker.

But by definition, the high intelligence side of the bell curve is reserved for those in the top 5-10% of intelligence levels in any particular domain. Which means that the remaining 80-90% of us are somewhere in the middle. That’s right, we’re mid-wits.

Note: there might be a handful of low-wits and high-wits reading this but I’m only addressing the 90% of you mid-wits.

There are a few ways you can react to this horrifying revelation:

• You can accept that you’re a mid-wit. Nothing wrong with that.

• You can be offended that I called you a mid-wit. If you let yourself be offended, you will let that ruin your day. You will then deny it. And you will do nothing to change your reality.

• You can try to become a high-wit. But know that you can probably only become a high-wit, an expert, in one or two areas and you’re going to have to dedicate your life to that pursuit. You can do it, anyone can, but it isn’t easy or probable.

• Or, my favorite solution of all, is strive to be the low-wit in all areas of life.

Key Lesson of the Wits

The key lesson of the mid-wit meme is that the mid-wit overcomplicates everything.

The low wit and high wit, meanwhile, arrive at the same conclusion or same approach. And their conclusion is usually the simplest.

Here are some of the low-wit and high-wit conclusions on different topics:

Personal Finance - spend less than you make

Health - Eat healthy and stay active

Investing - buy and hold index funds

Happiness - I spend my time doing what I love

I argue that your position on the mid-wit curve is domain-specific and that you should always strive to be the low wit.

If you’re already a low-wit, well, chances are you aren’t reading this because you’re already doing something you enjoy more than reading some random internet blog.

If you’re a high-wit, and have some humility, you recognize that despite how intelligent you are there are tons of people as smart or smarter than you and so you’re better off striving to be like the low-wit.

It you’re a high-wit, and you don’t have some humility, you probably aren’t reading this anyway. You saw the title of the article and didn’t click on it.

And if you’re the mid-wit, you can spend your life struggling and striving to be the high-wit which is more likely to result in you being even more of a mid-wit i.e. complicating your every endeavor unnecessarily.

The Solution

The solution then, in every domain of knowledge and skill, is to strive to be the low-wit.

How?

• Have humility.

• Seek simplicity.

• Don’t overthink

• Don’t overanalyze.

• Take action.