This Is the Number 1 Sign of High Intelligence, According to Steve Jobs

School smart and real-world smart are, as we all know, not the same thing. It’s perfectly possible to ace every test in college and struggle in life after you graduate. So if academic grades aren’t enough to prove a person is smart, how do the world’s most successful people spot the truly, practically intelligent?

Jeff Bezos looks for the ability to change your mind frequently. Elon Musk is all about examining skills over credentials. Steve Jobs, however, took another approach.

The legendary Apple co-founder laid out how he defines real intelligence in a talk to the Academy of Achievement way back in 1982 (hat tip to Alan Trapulionis). According to Jobs, the key to being truly smart isn’t deep expertise in one field, but instead the ability to make unexpected connections between fields.

Breadth beats depth.

“A lot of [what it means to be smart] is the ability to zoom out, like you’re in a city and you could look at the whole thing from the 80th floor down at the city. And while other people are trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B reading these stupid little maps, you could just see it in front of you. You can see the whole thing,” Jobs says in the talk.