I've always resented a culture that places value to people based on how "smart" they were, as if it were an inherited genetic number from 1-100 that determined how great of a person you would become.
When you've met enough people who clearly brilliant in some ways and not brilliant in others, I think you can get a feeling that this obsession with "smartness" is...not smart.
Kids at college are obsessed with proving which of them in smarter, but in the world after college, most people stop caring about that and instead care about what you can produce. At which point diligence and good work habits predominate.
I think every institution creates a metric to value people. In sports it's the number of wins, in business it's how much money the person or company makes, in politics it's how high up in office one goes. Academia is no different and its metric is success in intellectual pursuits. Students in college pick that up just as athletes pick up the desire to win.
