Is your personality a liability or an asset?
Newsweek magazine published a language analysis of US presidents done by FactBase concluding that Donald Trump speaks at a mid-fourth grade level, the lowest of all presidents analyzed, more than one grade level below the next lowest, Harry Truman. The analysis assessed the first 30,000 words each president spoke in office, and ranked them on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale and more than two dozen other common tests analyzing English-language difficulty levels. FactBase compared these findings to Trump’s own claim that he is a genius.
Fake News Alert. Language reading level has very little relationship to traditional measures of intelligence (IQ).
Take John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton for example. In FactBase’s analysis, these two ranked right in the middle of the pack, speaking at 8th and 9th grade levels, respectively. Yet, according to a University of California Davis study of presidential intellectual brilliance, Clinton (estimated IQ of 156) and Kennedy (estimated IQ of 158) rank 3rd and 4th among the smartest US presidents. Only John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were ahead of them. Clinton is widely regarded as one the most effective communicators in recent history.
Intellectual brilliance has little to no relationship with communication effectiveness. Not even education level. So what is the differentiator between smart people who can communicate, and smart people who can’t? Personality Agility and Social-Emotional Intelligence.
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