This requires not just intelligence, but also a desire to learn about something or another. You have to stop and think and want to make sense of your world, to organize it and recognize a pattern so that next time you see or experience a similar pattern you can have some idea of what is coming next.
It is like riding a bicycle, only by doing can you know when you are in danger of tipping over. Only then can you know where "the edge" is at.
Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great and numerous other books, once said: "The right people don't need to be managed. If you need to tightly manage someone, you've made a hiring mistake." In the same vein, if someone needs to be taught everything, you have the wrong person.
Time and time again I have seen the people who were most successful at Richway constantly "teaching themselves" something new on an almost daily basis. I always talked about giving people a "long rope" at Richway. They could either "hang themselves" or have a great time and "swing high". Being able to teach themselves was an important part of using the long rope to their advantage.
It has been said that the class clown can make the best salesman because he learns just how far he can push people .... he learns how to read them (fellow students and teachers) better than the next guy, because he is always pushing the boundary of humor vs getting in real trouble. He learns to quickly read where the "edge" is at with a given person in a given situation. He can put this ability to his advantage in the process of selling. He has to learn this himself. Nobody can teach it to him. The two best salesmen that I know both admit to having been class clowns.
So it is in life and in business. Nobody can teach you a lot of things. You have to find them out for yourself by doing and experiencing.
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