Keeping It Simple Doesn’t Mean You’re Stupid

“Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.” C. W. Ceran
I consider myself to be a somewhat intelligent person, but when someone explains a new concept to me in terms that are overly complex and unfamiliar, I struggle to easily grasp it. To learn a new concept, I need things described in a way that I can relate them to something I am already familiar with. For example, when I was a young CEO starting a software company, I needed to learn about computer hardware so I could speak intelligently on the subject. I asked my IT employees to teach me, and they proceeded to explain to me that computers were made up of a hard drive that stored gigabytes of data, Random Access Memory (RAM), a Central Processing Unit (CPU) and so on. They may as well have been speaking Chinese to me at that point, because although I could hear the words they were saying, I couldn’t relate them to anything that was familiar to me.  I left the room feeling discouraged and frustrated.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/amyanderson/2014/02/27/keeping-it-simple-doesnt-mean-youre-stupid/