My 9-year-old son Colter loves to make me feel stupid. All he has to do is ask, "Mommy, what's a rhombus?" and I'm reminded of my limitations.

Like me, Colter enjoys his intelligence. But lately I've been wondering whether being smart is as advantageous as we think.

When I was my son's age -- and later a teenager -- I too believed the '60s slogan "Knowledge is power." I accumulated as much of both as I could. I was book smart and street smart, determined to make my way in the world armed with information.

It turns out that determination, more than my grades or test scores, may have been responsible for where I've gone and what I've done.

In a New Yorker essay about Ivy League admissions, writer Malcolm Gladwell described the relationship between initial inclinations, "getting in," and subsequent success. He finds that "For most students, the general rule seems to be that if you are a hardworking and intelligent person you'll end up doing well regardless of where you went to school."

So why am I still paying off student loans? Because finding a community where I belonged felt priceless to me.

I recently returned to that community, my alma mater -- Barnard College, where the median math SAT score is 660, the verbal is 690 and graduates include eight Pulitzer Prize winners. I found myself surrounded once again by smart, strong, sarcastic women making all kinds of choices. They have gray hair and purple hair. They live in cities and in deserts. They are cardiologists and mothers.

By any measure, they are successful. But how did they become so?

According to Gladwell's reporting, native intelligence isn't enough.

"Being a smart child isn't a particularly good predictor of success in later life," he wrote. "'Non-intellective' factors -- like motivation and social skills -- probably matter more."

That sounds right. We all know people who are very nice or politically astute and manage to do very well for themselves, even though they may not be as capable as we'd expect.

Part of the problem may be our definitions. When we say someone is smart, we mean so many different things. We may mean that she is articulate or skilled. We may mean he is clever or well-read. We may mean all of those and well-rounded, too.

The idea that success may hinge on balancing multiple ways of knowing allows for creativity, intuition, emotional literacy and more.

It explains people who compete phenomenally well at board games such as Trivial Pursuit but not so well in the boardroom. We fault them for that because we value intelligence as a status symbol, more interested in what it gets us -- an impeccable degree, an important title, an impressive income -- than what it gives us.

Are we creating monsters with multiple titles and degrees?

At what point can I put down The New Yorker and and watch "Grey's Anatomy" without feeling guilty?

There's no question that intelligence can be a disadvantage at times. As a young woman, I was too intense, too intimidating and too ambitious for myself and my peers, I imagine. I hadn't grown into my brain or my potential.

While I believed that knowledge is power, I also felt that ignorance was bliss. It seemed the smarter I was, the unhappier I became.

And then there was all the stuff I didn't know -- I switched schools at least a half-dozen times between third and eighth grades, leaving me with educational gaps in art history, musical theory and biology. These days, my husband helps our son with science and social studies homework, while I pay close attention.

But if intelligence is the ability to think clearly and critically, wisdom is knowing how much there is to learn.

Life tests us, but it doesn't quiz us. You can't cram for work. Or study the Cliffs Notes to parenthood.

We make mistakes. We succeed and we fail. We live and we love and we learn. In the end, we hope to wake up smarter today than yesterday.

And that's all I need to know.

Julie Moos is a fortysomething who lives with her husband and son. Her column appears every other Thursday. To read more of her thoughts, visit MomInTheMirror.com.