
Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010) - SworDsy
http://www.jamiebegin.com/high-iq-will-kill-startup
======
conroe64
IMHO, to continually put "success" above everything else in your life and
slave away towards that goal as the ultimate redemption in everything is a
waste of your time and therefore your life.

It can be such as easy sell, especially to people with low self-esteem... if
only you were rich, had a great body, had success with the opposite sex, etc.,
etc. And always underlying it, but never spoken of, is the vain and self
centered attempt to compare yourself to others and come out on top.

When these goals are achieved, rarely does anyone publicly say that it wasn't
worth it. It's like a bad marriage rotting from the inside. No one wants to
admit to being a fool. So stuff like this propagate, it's a beautiful lie.
Rather than think of how awesome your life will be if you just work a little
harder and achieve success, you might as well be talking about how great
heaven will be as long as you follow some arbitrary religious text.

It's like you think someone out there is keeping score, and it's all some type
of game which you can win. We came from nature, and in nature, nobody keeps
score. Animals live and die on the basis of stupid luck all the time. On your
death bed you probably won't be looking over your life and decide whether it
was worthwhile or not, and give yourself some report card on it. Instead you
more likely won't even remember more than bits and pieces, and then eventually
die and forget it all.

The hero in the story is an Israeli soldier who decided to risk his life over
a few dollars in his pocket. To do what, prove he was macho? He was really
stupid in my book. And we're supposed to, according to the author, look up to
this man? Train all our lives as a knife fighter, so we, too, can take dumb
risks and be lucky enough to not get killed doing so? What if it went the
other way, and the soldier friend was hurt or killed? Would the author still
be putting him on a pedestal as he does so?

I'm not saying don't try. Just make sure you are enjoying what you are doing,
first and foremost. If you're not happy, either motivate yourself in a
positive way, or let it go. It really isn't worth it.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Being poor completely sucks. Watching your cat die from cancer that you can't
afford to treat sucks.

The point of getting rich is so that your life doesn't suck. Not to compare
yourself to others.

Getting rich is necessarily hard, otherwise everyone would be on the road to
becoming rich. People are unlikely to get rich by doing work which satisfies.
But if they make it, then at least life won't suck anymore.

~~~
bestdaytostart
Being poor does suck. However, being rich does not prevent your life from
sucking. All the money in the world won't prevent you or a loved one from
passing due to an untreatable illness. All the money in the world won't buy
you friends or genuine respect. It can't buy you love (though it can buy you
sex).

Furthermore, you don't need to be rich to avoid the hardship of being poor,
you just have to make a sufficient amount to afford quality housing, food,
health insurance, and minor luxuries.

~~~
selmnoo
> It can't buy you love

Not to be a smartass here, but that's probably false. Money buys you social
recognition, something that is an important part of your mate valuation. Rich
folks will generally have a better time finding 'love' than the poor. The
richer you are, the better your chances, more or less.

Money really is very important in the modern day. I wish it weren't this way
-- I don't want to be doing selfish things, but sadly this just is the way it
is.

~~~
abalashov
Agreed. However, in a day and age where (in the Western world, anyway) women
no longer need men overtly for financial support, social recognition as mating
currency is just that--social recognition. It can be, and very often is,
orthogonal to wealth. Witness all the young women in love with crappy DJs,
self-styled pseudo-unemployed hipsters, no-name sidewalk band heroes, stoners,
and a variety of Bohemians that a conservative dad would call losers or
starving artists--er, artistes.

Financial and career success is definitely one way to up your mate value,
though it has more resonance once women get out of their twenties. It's not
the only way. When you're young, particularly, it may not even be the best
way. Vide all the fairly intelligent guys with steady, well-paying jobs (very
much so, by the standards of median American household income) that nobody
pays attention to, really. The broke dudes that know how to put out their
plumage and leverage some other, more conspicuous cultural archetype get much
more play.

I'm not a washed-up, embittered MRA or PUA guy, btw. Just playing Devil's
Advocate. :-)

~~~
Retric
There are far more women than well off men.

The real issue for most men is time. A 20 something working 60 hour weeks
spends far less time 'playing the game' than a DJ etc. Also, relationships
take time if your doing a start-up 'on the side' it's going to play hell with
most relationships.

------
bocalogic
Years ago I was traveling to Oakland for business. My flight was delayed so I
hit the magazine store. Bought some gaming magazines, business magazines and
one copy of Havard Business Review. There was an article in it that caught my
eye, "Why do dumb people succeed more in business than smart people."

I dont remember exactly the title but it was an 8 to 10 page article that went
into detail comparing high IQ people to average or low IQ people and why
people with lower average IQ did better in business. The article was filled
with graphs and case studies and was very interesting.

But the last paragraph really summarized it best, "Smart people consistently
over analyzed risk and talked themselves out of taking risks while someone
with a lower IQ didnt even think about the risk and jumped in with both feet
and took chances."

It gets back to the saying "No risk / No reward".

I remember that article to this day and always do a gut check when it comes to
evaluating new risks. Sometimes I second voice my old European grandfather who
was all about hard work in a different industry but his life lessons hold
true.

Turning off the brain chatter and clearly evaluating a situation is critical
but it s very hard because intelligent people, and humans in general, like to
avoid risk and the temporary unpleasant pain that accompanies it.

~~~
agent00f
I wonder if such studies are susceptible to bad stats of confirmation bias as
many business studies are.

What I mean is whether they had proper controls to assess whether _each_
average person is more likely to succeed than _each_ "smart" person given the
same scenario.

If they instead took a bunch of successful people, figured out that a lot of
them weren't that "smart", then it could be the product of there being a lot
more average than smart folk. In other words, "smart" doesn't _guarantee_
business success such that all successful businesspeople are IQ gods, but we
all knew that.

------
TeMPOraL
I took an important lesson from that article, completely unrelated to
startups, when first reading it few years ago.

> _The man with the knife did not know how to use that knife. If he had been
> as trained in knife fighting as I was in hand combat, he would have been
> able to destroy me. But he had a tool that he felt gave him an advantage
> (...)_

You can have a false sense of confidence that because you possess a particular
tool, you're safe, even though you have no idea how to use it. If the first
time you discover how the tool works is in a dangerous situation, you'd likely
be much better of if you didn't have that tool in the first place.

I applied this lesson many times in my life. For example, after a theoretical
worplace safety course at my job I realized I have no clue how fire
extinguishers actually work, so I bought one and fired it outside in an area
where it wouldn't disturb anybody. And now I know how extinguishers behave and
what to expect from them. Another time, a friend of mine was planning to buy
pepper spray, because she was often returning late at night from university. I
told her to buy two cans, because just having a spray will instill a false
sense of confidence in her. We used up the second spray for "training", for
her to see how it actually works, so that in case of real danger, she wouldn't
have to worry about how to use the gas and how it actually works.

~~~
mtdewcmu
That reminds me of this slightly crazy guy I knew in college and roomed with
senior year. He had been an RA, and "somehow," during some meeting, he managed
to discharge part of a pepper spray canister, which led to the meeting having
to be evacuated. I think it must have been accidental, precipitated --
obviously -- by playing with it at an utterly inappropriate time.

I don't take any life lesson from the article, which was vaguely glib and
self-satisfied. Life is never fair; sometimes you have the knife and don't
know how to use it; sometimes you work hard and lose the fight for not having
a knife. What you want is to have both the knife, the right preparation, and
the right opportunity to use it all at the same time. How do you go about
setting all that up?

~~~
judk
Success is predicated on serendipity. Chance favors the prepared mind. Be
prepared. Make your own luck.

We can't control what happens to us, but we can try to make the best of what
comes instead of falling to the worst.

~~~
mtdewcmu
Yes, no question. In fact, some amount of the sentiment you espoused is
considered such airtight good advice that it has been built right into law.
Universal education, for instance. No one seriously thinks everything taught
in grade school is so essential that if you forget even one fact, guaranteed
disaster follows. Clearly, the guiding principle is to teach a little of
everything, under the theory that it's inherently good to be prepared, and
even if you only retain 50% -- so what.

I think it might be literally impossible to totally reject what you said, in
the sense that you could probably die if you were 100% against preparedness.
So, yeah.

------
hyp0
aka _the tortoise and the hare_
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare)),
or, for a more topical treatment _determination beats intelligence_
([http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html),
[http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html))

It's universal.

e.g. I'm not supersmart, but maybe halfway between supersmart and average -
enough to have glimpses; to know what I'm missing; that my reach exceeds my
grasp. I breezed though school, undergrad, honours, masters. The game was how
little work I could do. But at PhD level I wanted to do world-class work, and
so glimpsed ideas I couldn't effortlessly "just grasp". I kept trying to "just
grasp" them in different ways...

Now, finally, I'm attempting to build up my skills, one higher-level at a
time. It's ughhh because it makes me feel really stupid... but that's just
because I am. At least, relative to the task. I'm making progress. So I've got
that going for me, which is nice.

The common wisdom is that less intelligent people hit this barrier earlier,
and (if they want to) learn the skills to overcome it when younger. They are
net better off.

~~~
Karellen
Also, The Curse of the Gifted

[http://lwn.net/2000/0824/a/esr-sharing.php3](http://lwn.net/2000/0824/a/esr-
sharing.php3)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221756)

------
underwater
I take issue with the assumption that you're not a success unless you're a VP
at a consulting firm. In particularly the assertion that the other engineers
in the story -- who for all we know may have preferred to remain in their
roles -- have suffered some terrible fate that we need to be warned against.

~~~
sergiotapia
It's funny because my dad's idea of success is owning a company and making a
lot of money.

I have different goals. I'd rather earn 80 a year and work 9-to-5 than slave
away at work.

~~~
jordanthoms
Or own a company / work harder and save the additional cash, then retire at
40?

~~~
sergiotapia
Yep and your kids are teenagers and you missed their entire childhood because
you were at the office. No thanks brah.

~~~
judk
Are teenagers such terrible people?

After the 350 diaper, the deep emotional rewards start to have diminishing
marginal utility. Work/Life balance is possible.

------
b1daly
Hey, since no one else is bringing up the "citation please" criticism of the
post, I will. Sorry, but it's just a dumb thesis, asserted in utter
confidence. The evidence to support it would be something along the lines of
an inverse relationship between a measurable aspect of intelligence and a
measurable aspect of startup or other life failure.

Intuitively, I highly doubt such a relationship exists.

Otherwise, the article is basically making the observation that being
"successful" in business is generally hard.

But it's the internet, you can say whatever you want!

------
adamzerner
1\. It would have been helpful to be more specific about what is meant by
"intelligence". I get the sense that it is referring to knowledge and/or
aptitude.

2\. I think the message is, "Intelligence isn't enough. You also need
perseverance to succeed." I don't know if the implication is if those two
conditions are necessary, or that they're sufficient, but it sort of felt like
it was saying that they're sufficient. The examples seem like they were making
the point that, once you add perseverance on to the intelligence, you get
success.

Anyway, success is obviously more complicated than "intelligence" \+
perseverance. I'm sure the author knows this, but the article seemed to
oversimplify things, and didn't try to really break success into its
components.

~~~
alexeisadeski3
1\. IQ

2\. Think he meant necessary.

------
funkyy
I like how some people do this IQ tests and brag how smart they are. The
intelligence do not come from how you solve a test, or what degree you got.
The intelligence is art of using a brain in a smart way in my opinion. Your
tool is your brain. You can put it in to the rest, you can let it do the job,
or you can actually test drive it and push it as hard as you can.

------
fizz_ed
This reminds me a bit of a steve yegge quote.

"Having a good memory is a serious impediment to understanding. It lets you
cheat your way through life."

This also reminds me quite a bit of the famous conversation between Eric S.
Raymond and Linus Torvalds about "the curse of the gifted."

------
denysonique
"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not;
nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not;
unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full
of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The
slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human
race."

~~~
judk
His reminds me of the horse in _Animal Farm_. His mantra was "I will work
harder" , and he worked himself to death in support of the crafty manipulative
pigs.

------
mtdewcmu
The more I think about this and reread it, the more smug and self-serving it
sounds, and the more difficult it becomes to believe that this manages to pass
for a gem of wisdom and sage advice. It is nothing but a negative stereotype
of people with high IQs as being essentially lazy and entitled. What motive is
there to stereotype people with high intelligence? It sounds like sour grapes.
Couldn't it be true, though? The history of similar stereotypes isn't good;
lazy and entitled is one of the all-time most popular stereotypes of any
despised out-group, and I suspect it hasn't been the go-to slander because it
has a superior likelihood of turning out to be true and defensible. Here's a
one-word rebuttal: doctors. We adopt stereotyped beliefs simply because of how
they make us feel. Ordinarily, intelligent people would seem to make a poor
target, because it's a group that, by definition, is distinguished by
superiority, having as its sole determinant a very high IQ. It's not so easy
to identify who around you might be in this group, and to attack it, you would
seem to have to admit being less intelligent. The built-in requirement to
demean your own intelligence along the way could almost just poison any
possible benefit of stereotyping. But -- I'm not familiar with the name Max
Klein, and it's such a combination of common names that it's almost ideal for
being impervious to Google. From context and clues, though, I gather that this
person must have achieved some amount of fame due to some startup-related
achievement. I speculated in another comment that if anything could confer a
license to feel superior to practically anyone, it would be having a
successful startup. Who wouldn't want one, and by virtue of having it, in a
way you are smarter than PhDs and Nobel Prize winners. The source largely
makes no difference, though. You can judge a piece of writing completely on
its own merits. This particular piece of writing falls apart under closer
examination.

~~~
dwaltrip
You are over analyzing this. The author isn't deriding those with
intelligence, he simply said it can sometimes provide a false sense of
assurance. He also implied that in a start up, hard work matters more than raw
intelligence, but intelligence can provide some advantage.

~~~
mtdewcmu
I'm not sure if I'm reading too much in, or if most people miss what it
actually said and mentally insert platitudes. Even if it hedges all of its
statements at some point and ends on a perfectly nonoffensive note, it still
seems like a mediocre essay, because then it has absolutely nothing to say and
uses a lot of words to say nothing.

"Your IQ will kill your Startup" sounds like bold language to me. At the very
least, there are overtones of anti-intellectualism. I don't see why HN is
receptive to that.

~~~
dwaltrip
I definitely agree with you that the title is over the top (a little click-
baity). I think the tone of the actual essay is more reasonable.

While it may a somewhat mediocre piece, I didn't see anything to indicate
anti-intellectualism. However un-original, the main idea is important and
worth being reminded of (at least, I enjoyed the reminder). I think the last
two paragraphs sum it up well.

~~~
mtdewcmu
I guess you have to read between the lines just a tad to see it the way I do.
In fact, you have to do it rather literally, because some of the irritating
message that I read into it I'm basing on the fact that certain things were
left out that I think virtually any other author would have included. There
are at least two ways to read something like this: 1. You could look
exclusively at the words that are written and attempt to take them entirely at
face value. I say attempt, because I'm not sure there necessarily always is a
face value: sometimes the writer just can't figure out what he actually wants
to say, and when you read the piece, it's nothing but a disconnected jumble of
sentences. Some sentences seem to be going somewhere, but different sentences
are in conflict with each other about where to go, and the piece ends up going
nowhere. So what's the face value? I think most people are charitable and will
insert their own message when there isn't really one there, and they actually
seem to do it unconsciously without being aware that they made up their own
message. I think that's what most people do with something like this. 2. You
could, instead, read it as if you were standing directly behind the person as
they were writing the essay, looking over their shoulder, trying to figure out
what's going on in their head. For better or for worse, I'm inclined to go to
#2. At least, I will go there at times when what I'm reading seems incoherent,
and I find myself more interested in the person writing than with the message
they want me to hear.

I could go on and dissect the whole essay, paragraph by paragraph, reporting
what the motivation seems to be there, and I wouldn't necessarily mind. But HN
comment threads have a way of trailing off, and sometimes you end up talking
to yourself... so I try to cut my comments off ahead of that.

------
ChuckMcM
One of the things a good University program does is take someone to past the
limits of their natural intelligence. Running into the wall is one of the
rites of passage of figuring out how to work. For me it was electromagnetic
field theory, that crap kicked my butt! But getting through the class on
additional study and work was pretty important for me.

~~~
mtdewcmu
And, years later, slowly but surely, you've managed to rack up a breathtaking
point-score in your HN karma account. That electromagnetic field theory work
must have instilled you with tremendous karma. :)

------
randallsquared
I don't think the knife analogy is a great one. High IQ is more like having a
ladder, in a world of cliffs. Someone can train themselves to jump higher than
a ladder which is relatively short, but a ladder of two or three standard
deviations is no longer in that range. If you have a tall ladder, try to focus
your efforts higher.

~~~
andrewflnr
I guess that works, but then the point of the article is that someone who
doesn't have a ladder but trains to climb the cliff face will eventually beat
someone who only knows how to use their ladder.

~~~
mtdewcmu
The point had to do with knives, not ladders. If you have a knife and you're
well-trained in knife skills, and your adversaries are all armed only with
ladders, you are easily going to win that fight. I think that's the point he
was trying to make.

~~~
phlo
The point was to emphasize how ladders are clearly superior to knives, or even
sticks. As has been demonstrated in literature[1].

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrRFzwPE0d4&t=3m13s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrRFzwPE0d4&t=3m13s)

~~~
mtdewcmu
Jackie Chan is the obvious and only exception to the rule. He could kick
anyone's ass with a ladder.

------
keithpeter
The bit about clever people who have always found it easy to achieve rings
true when you are working with training teachers.

They have problems with the teaching sometimes. These problems are not easy,
scalar or well defined. There are no 'textbook' solutions. Some cope with the
messy reality well and some don't.

------
freechoice22
Good article and reminder of how it is. To learn from our failures and
hardships is where we grow the most.

IQ is only few percent of the total intelligence. But most people seem to see
it as 99% so often.

It also comes down to so many other factors such as the environment we are
brought up in, which affects our intelligence. Intelligence is not some
blueprint we have from birth I learned. But very much our mental outlook on
life as we progress. Those who feel intelligent due to high IQ makes me wonder
how intelligent they truly are.

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-
funda...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-
fundamentally-flawed-and-using-them-alone-to-measure-intelligence-is-a-
fallacy-study-finds-8425911.html)

------
graycat
The title of this post

> Your high IQ will kill your startup

is too strong to be correct: The claim of "will kill" is claiming too much;
'might kill' is closer to being correct.

In more detail, the OP essentially assumes that an intelligent person will try
to 'coast' or 'relax' and depend just on their intelligence instead of working
hard, learning more that is important, and doing the actual work needed for
success. This assumption need not be correct in all cases, and my experience
indicates that it is significantly wrong.

Why? The OP mentions early school where intelligent people do well easily.
Well, then, commonly they also get motivated to continue on in school. By the
time they get to some junior/senior level courses in their major, to courses
in graduate school, to the published peer-reviewed papers as background for
their research, and to their Ph.D, research, they necessarily will have plenty
of opportunities to encounter material where they have to work their little
fingers, toes, and tails off. E.g., in computer science, if really
intelligent, then jump all the way to tenured full professor in one stroke,
just settle the question P versus NP. So far apparently no one has been
intelligent enough to solve that problem.

I've seen plenty of really intelligent people work their fingers, toes, and
tails off in graduate school. Net, there are plenty of challenges in graduate
school strong enough for the most intelligent people to have to work their
fingers, toes, and tails off with levels of hard work that would compare with
hard work from anyone from a galley slave, a dirt farmer, etc.

Often, including in parts of school, intelligence alone is not enough, and
plenty of intelligent people are smart enough to see this point. And, in cases
of work challenges, since their pride from their intelligence is being tested,
usually in a sense that is at least semi-public and, thus, visible to others
from whom the person wants respect, they are motivated to do the real work
needed for success.

While the OP is claiming too much, it is possible for intelligent people to
fail and for various reasons quite different from what the OP explained.

~~~
dang
> The claim of "will kill" is claiming too much; 'might kill' is closer to
> being correct

You're right, and we applied your edit. That was a bit of linkbait that snuck
through. So is "your" in the title, for that matter, but we'll leave that.

------
vomitcuddle
Not everyone has a "I just moved to a foreign country and have to make a
living somehow" moment.

Any __specific __advice for a person who found school easy and now has
problems challenging themselves further in live?

~~~
nmrm
Move to a foreign country without much cash for a summer or so. Hopefully your
employer is accommodating; if not, find a good story or line-up a new job.
It's an incredibly liberating experience. Puts a lot into perspective.

------
nadam
This is true, but precisely because it is true, at the top of every game
everybody is reasonably hard working. And among these hard-working people
other factors start to decide again, and a very important factor is talent.

So if you compare yourself to the guy who watches TV all day, of course hard
work is the main thing. But if you compare yourself to fellow enterpreneurs,
Phd studentst, hackers with great github repositories, or guys who work long
hours at their workplace to advance, who maybe does not watch TV at all,
talent matters.

~~~
judk
At some point, you hit a region where access to capital and powerful friends
is the difference, not talent. For example, Larry Page and Zuck had wealthy
investors and access to enployees who were more talented than themselves but
accepted a lower share in the conpanies they built.

------
coryl
I can't help but have heard this story before, perhaps by an HN user in
another thread in the past. Didn't the Ofer fellow end up dieing in a robbery
further down the line?

------
junto
I have a nice counter example to this. I've travelled extensively in South and
Central America. I met a guy who had been robbed twice in Rio, one week apart,
by the same guy, at the same time in the evening, in the same place.

I also had the feeling though that some people are just magnets for trouble.

Personally, I always travelled with two wallets. One real one stashed in belt
and the other with 10 USD in it. People will walk away 99℅ of the time with
the $10.

------
ammon
Choosing to fight a man with a knife who is trying to rob you is stupid and
dangerous, regardless of your training. I'm not sure what this says about the
thesis.

~~~
ilaksh
I think it suggests that a big part of success is luck. He was lucky that man
didn't really know how to use the knife or intend to kill him with it.

Anyway forget the mugging analogy because it is a stretch and distracts from
useful information.

First, people aren't so much smarter than others than they think. People who
persevere are more likely to be "lucky", since they keep trying until they are
"lucky".

Another huge aspect of this is self-identity. If you think you are supposed to
be a consulting VP, then you can be. Most people don't think that.

Another huge aspect of success is advantage. This can be in the form of a
social network or just having a slightly well-off uncle to give a loan at an
important time. Or it can just be physical health.

When it comes down to it, circumstances play a larger role than I think most
people in our current structure want to believe. This is not a machine that
rewards merit.

There is also a strange focus on the individual in this mindset.

But I go back to the belief that innate intelligence differences between
humans are generally not nearly as great as we think they are. I also think
that often circumstantial difficulties can be overcome, if there is enough
perseverance. So I think one of the most important factors may be identity. In
other words, who do you think you are?

~~~
vinceguidry
If someone is mugging you with a knife, guaranteed he never took the time or
the expense to learn how to properly use his weapon. Or he wouldn't have any
need to mug someone.

------
korzun
Plenty of people are not 'intelligent' and have no motivation.

Dinner with 'vice president at one of the top 5 consulting companies in the
world'.

That sounds like something out of:

"Intelligent?!?! Read TOP 10 things that you are doing wrong right now!"

------
crimsonalucard
With odds at one in 176 million the only people who succeed in winning the
lottery are those stupid enough to try.

------
NotVerySmart
To sound intentionally arrogant and possibly ignorant, this whole write-up is
captain-obvious material.

~~~
hellodevnull
Yes I thought everybody knew by now that intelligence is pretty much
insignificant when you're up against somebody with years of experience at
something.

There was even a very popular pop psych book about it that everyone has read
(Outliers).

Your high IQ might get you good grades in elementary but gaining _skill_
(which is what you're all talking about) is done through practice.

~~~
rimantas
but there is also this: [http://www.spring.org.uk/2014/07/the-10000-hours-
myth-practi...](http://www.spring.org.uk/2014/07/the-10000-hours-myth-
practice-predicts-only-12-of-performance.php)

------
crimsonalucard
This article is more about perseverance and hard work then it is about
intelligence.

------
gaelow
What high IQ?

------
fr0ggerrr
Reminds me of the military.

------
ducthinhdt
Good article.

------
PeterGriffin
The point the article makes is well understood and valid: even if you have the
potential, if you don't work hard to use it, you won't develop the skills and
discipline for success. All right.

But we don't need to cast failures and flaws as the result of "high
intelligence". Just a few days ago we had an article about the "curse of smart
people". It feels like a bunch of people patting themselves on the back and
telling themselves "oh, we're so intelligent, this is why we failed".

If intelligent people are so prone to failure, what is the purpose of
measuring intelligence? Being stupid is bad, being average is bad, now being
smart is also bad! Congratulations.

Part of the problem is the ease at which we proclaim ourselves "very
intelligent". Being good at school is not a sure sign of high intelligence -
school is an artificial environment that values short-term memorizing of
facts, over critical analysis and independent decision-making. You won't go
far in life with that, but maybe you'll do well in quiz TV shows. Solving
"missing piece" puzzles also isn't a sign of high intelligence. All those are
just a small part of it.

Can't we agree "intelligent" is the skill of _setting good goals_ , _achieving
them_ , and making _good decisions_ in light of limited facts, limited time,
and some stress, because _that 's what life is_, and move on to strive (and
possibly measure) for that.

~~~
metacorrector
Can't we agree? with redefining what intelligent means on the basis of your
reasonably well written discussion post? NO, we can't agree on that at all.

Your post is thoughtful and well meaning, but intelligence means... well I'm
not an expert at defining it (I know my limitations, learn from me), but the
people who are experts at it have devised tests for measuring it, and it's
extremely well documented, and measurable, and if you have it you score high
on IQ tests, and if you don't you don't.

I have it. It's been measured. And I know it when I see it in other people,
and always have, even before it was measured. If we sat down to play a new
board game that neither of us had seen before, I'd most likely learn it
quicker and start kicking your ass sooner.

Does that guarantee success in my life? no. Does it give me some potential?
yes. For some of reasons that you give. You wrote a good post. Just don't try
to redefine the word intelligence just so it can be a compliment paid to a
different set of people. And while we are at it, can we stop saying that
people are beautiful on the inside? "Beauty is only skin deep" is an
expression because that's what the word means.

Yes, I'm aware that it is in the nature of language that words evolve and
humans like extending the meanings of words and making analogies and
metaphors, and that it can have perfectly understandable meaning to say that
people with "emotional intelligence are beautiful on the inside", but that
doesn't redefine the words nor rename the concepts.

/rant

~~~
PeterGriffin
> _Just don 't try to redefine the word intelligence just so it can be a
> compliment paid to a different set of people._

I believe the word "intelligence" should pay a compliment to those people who
life pays compliment to, in terms of their ability to find solutions to real
world problems, and carry out their execution. If we can't do that (and I'm
not saying we can), then measuring some idea of "intelligence" and assigning a
flat score to it is counterproductive.

How quickly one picks up on board games... I don't know. Maybe it matters.
Maybe it means something. What if those who pick up on board games slower are
building a much deeper model in their mind and can reach deeper insights than
their opponents? Would speed then be a misleading indicator?

Take me, I pick up on new things _slower_ than many might. But over time I get
a much better idea about it and become frustrated with the superficial way my
peers see it. Am I stupid, am I smart? Who knows. Sometimes gaining _too much_
insight is actually _harming_ performance for real world problems. Sometimes
it helps. I'm neither ashamed nor proud by this arrangement. I just have my
dials set this way.

Is life like a big logical puzzle? Shouldn't we judge people by their _life_
performance if it is? Should we _not_ judge people by simple puzzle games if
it isn't?

Lots of questions, and if you dig deeper, you'll find the experts don't know
much better than us after all.

The way we measure intelligence is much like we measure candidate performance
during job interviews. It's full of "experts" with recommendations, and yet
the questions and challenges have little to do with the actual job, or the job
performance of the candidate when hired.

~~~
metacorrector
We can judge people on life performance, nobody has any problem with that.

Why do you want the word for successful life performace to be intelligence?

or to put it another way, the article you are responding to is making that
point that high IQ people aren't always successful for some reasons. How is
the point the author is making enhanced by changing the definitions? if
intelligence means that your company will be successful, how will the OP write
his article to make his point, because his point would still apply. Are you
proposing another word?

------
michaelochurch
At first (before I RTFA) I was going to come here to disagree vehemently.
There are severe founder-quality issues right now and a lot of that has to do
with low-IQ people who failed out of banking or management consulting getting
funded, while actually smart people with less social polish get fuck-all. 140+
IQ doesn't mean much, but I'd fund a 140+ over a well-connected douchebag any
day of the year. The problem is that so many not-smart people (Spiegel,
Duplan) are getting funded and it's generating such a slew of crap companies
that the rising generation (Millennials) may have lost the knowledge necessary
to build good ones.

Then I RTFA and found that I agree, wholeheartedly. The metaphor he gives is
of an overconfident assailant who has a knife, but is untrained and is beaten
by a bare-handed opponent.

Correctly, we assess our enemies in office politics as being stupider. That
VP/NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who-The-Fuck-Knows) doesn't know what a monad is. He
probably couldn't write a for-loop to save his own dick. Those bikeshedding
"big picture guys" who "do product" aren't intellectually sophisticated
people. All that said, they continue to beat the piss out of us in the game of
office politics. They do nothing but, somehow, get paid twice as much and get
to make a lot of decisions that we ought to be making. As a group, we have to
stop fucking moping, figure out why, and change it.

Too many software engineers are so self-congratulatory about their
intellectual ability, and too easily swayed by bullshit perks, to realize that
they're actually getting robbed blind by jerks in The Business who aren't
nearly as smart (they don't have the knife) but who've been training at social
machination and in dominating other people for as long as we've been studying
computers.

We have to stop thinking it's "dirty" or undignified or unprofessional to "get
political" and figure out a way to get our due. We have to stop putting our
heads in the sand and saying "I just want to code". We are a hard-working
group (even the smart ones work really hard) but we need to accept that some
of that hard work is going to have to involve learning CS 666 (software
politics), as ugly as the skill may be, and playing to win, to fucking
demolish our enemies instead of having them defeat us.

~~~
foobarian
The logic in this comment doesn't really work for me. I like to code, and am
thankful that my company enables me to do it most of the time instead of
dealing with a bunch of non-coding issues. I really don't want to learn office
politics, "play to win" (win at what? I already won), "demolish my enemies"
(what makes them my enemies? If they weren't around I'd have to do more of
that non-coding crap work) etc.

Quoth Tao of Programming, koan 7.1:

A novice asked the Master: "In the East, there is a great tree-structure that
men call 'Corporate Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with vice
presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying 'Go
Hence!' or 'Go Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names
are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an unnatural
entity exist?"

The Master replied: "You perceive this immense structure and are disturbed
that it has no rational purpose. Can you not take amusement from its endless
gyrations? Do you not enjoy the untroubled ease of programming beneath its
sheltering branches? Why are you bothered by its uselessness?"

~~~
michaelochurch
_I like to code, and am thankful that my company enables me to do it most of
the time instead of dealing with a bunch of non-coding issues._

I understand this, but I think that you'll eventually get bored if you can't
get a sense of progress out of your work. This requires that you pick your
tools and problems. If you're lucky enough to work in an open-allocation
environment, and if that persists for 40 years, then that's great and you'll
never be bored or frustrated.

However, most programmers want their work to be progressive: bigger
challenges, more interesting problems, high-impact opportunities. This'll
inevitably put you on the battlefield with _status quo_ rent-seekers who hate
you just for improving things. Even if you're not a threat to them in anyway,
they'll hit you preemptively, just to prove that they can.

 _I really don 't want to learn office politics_

I understand. Who does? How many college kids say, "I want to get out there
and be a private-sector politician"? Probably very few.

It's a shitty game. It shouldn't exist. But it does, and the only way we can
hold it back is if good people are willing to join the fight, and able to win
it.

 _what makes them my enemies? If they weren 't around I'd have to do more of
that non-coding crap work_

It's not "programmer good, business bad". There are good businesspeople and
bad, turncoat programmers. What makes the bad guys bad is not what they do,
but the mentality. The bad guys are the ones who see us as overpaid cost
centers and peasantry. Decent people managers and entrepreneurs are worth
their weight in gold, but very rare: maybe 10% of the tribe.

A good manager knows that his job is to be a "sheep dog". His role is to
protect the people doing the work, from assaults on all sides, so they _can_
do the work. Whether it's an executive trying to squeeze employees or a low-
level employee being a toxic jerk (i.e. making sexist remarks, insulting
others' work) a good manager fights that. A _bad_ manager thinks that his
reports exist to serve him and that it doesn't go both ways.

~~~
mtdewcmu
The most obnoxious boss I ever had was a fellow programmer, and the problem
wasn't that he was a turncoat. He was just obnoxious. I think you could take
the problem you're describing and generalize it to any manager-managee
relationship, and it reduces to simple bad management. Some managers will be
attentive and make positive contributions, others will be inattentive and
destructive. The latter style is self-defeating, and that's going to be hard
to get away with forever.

~~~
michaelochurch
I don't know this person, but did you ever think that his obnoxiousness is the
result of a broken culture of anti-intellecutalism, recklessness, and machismo
that emerges naturally in a world where programmers are business subordinates,
as opposed to one in which we are autonomous professionals who are sponsored
rather than traditionally employed or managed?

It's not like obnoxious bosses have a tribal affiliation to "managers" versus
programmers. Sure, there are some who consciously think that way, but I don't
think it's the norm. The insufferable management consultant fuckheads who
comprise MBA Culture don't have any conscious allegiance to "MBA Culture".
They have an entitled way of thinking, for sure, but and some executives do
think tribally, but I don't think that a mentality of conscious allegiance
among and to "business people" is the norm.

~~~
mtdewcmu
The boss I'm talking about is a special case and one-of-a-kind as far as I
know. He also happens to be foreign-born and from a country that I don't know
much about. But he admitted once that his friends had nick-named him Eeyore on
account of his not-so-sunny disposition, so I think being obnoxious was/is a
cross he has to bear alone.

I'm too far removed from corporate culture right now to really feel what
you're saying. But Zed Shaw seemed to have similar gripes and he is very
funny. I'm sure you know of him, but if not, look him up.

~~~
mtdewcmu
I wonder if my comment was downvoted because I made him sound as if he was
cursed with some condition outside of his control and that's all. I feel sorry
for people who have self-defeating patterns of behavior that cause them
problems -- even if I, myself, could not stand to be around them, because I
don't believe anyone would willingly choose to have problems. This boss may
well have even been in that category. Who knows. But in point of fact, his
behavior was frankly abusive, vindictive, and bullying toward me, and he would
throw demonstrative fits of temper and behave in ways that I've never thought
possible to get away with in a workplace, all the while being very personal
and spewing pure hate. When this type of person is your boss, it only makes it
so much harder to deal with.

------
paulhauggis
I'm s glad to see an article like this on HN, as opposed to articles that
attribute success to massive amounts of luck.

~~~
girvo
As far as I've experienced, both are required.

~~~
rayiner
My dad has a version of this story. He was born in a village in Bangladesh and
while he's not a VP at a "top 5" consulting company, he raised us upper middle
class in an expensive DC suburb. He notes he was smart, but never the smartest
person; hard working, but not the hardest working person; in addition to both,
he was also very lucky.

There's an additional dimension too. Ambition and extroversion I guess. The
smartest, hardest working people I know from undergrad are engineering PhD's
toiling away on the tenure track. Failure according to the author.

------
DiabloD3
As someone with a high IQ, I can't help but agree with this in its entirety.
For those who thought this was too long, I can summarize it as thus: "Don't
overthink things, and refine your brain power. An unrefined brain is a useless
tool, no matter how smart you are."

