My brother once said of someone, “they strike me as being very intelligent, but not particularly thoughtful.” This distinction has had a profound effect on me. It’s hard for me to pin down what intelligence is, exactly. When I think of someone who is intelligent, I think of someone capable of understanding complex ideas, perhaps someone who has assimilated a lot of knowledge and makes connections between ideas. I also tend to think of speed: someone who can reason quickly, or assimilate new knowledge quickly. Thoughtfulness, on the other hand, feels more deliberate to me. Someone who is thoughtful mulls over new ideas and new information, rather than jumping to conclusions. A thoughtful person takes the time to interrogate their own assumptions. Of course, another sense of being thoughtful is being kind.
I find that I admire thoughtfulness more than intelligence now. The complexity of a person’s ideas, or the speed at which they are able to reason, are not as important to me as the care they take in arriving at those conclusions. Of course these qualities are not at odds with one another — a person can be both intelligent and thoughtful — but if I had to choose one for myself, I would choose thoughtful.
To me, being called thoughtful has become one of the highest compliments a person can be paid (along with being kind; which is, perhaps, the same thing).