John News

a little note for you, so you see / when I'm gone, I never go too far

Great Reminder about Intelligence

January 21, 2012

From Your high IQ will kill your startup:

People who are born intelligent start off life with everything easy for them. They don’t have to work hard to get good grades, they never really have to do much to get ahead. The major challenge of early life is school – and school is designed for average people. So intelligent people just breeze through.

But there is a point where every intelligent person faces something that requires more than intelligence. It requires hard work, it requires the ability to fail, it requires being able to do tough tasks, boring tasks. For the first time in their life, in spite of their intelligence, these intelligent people are challenged, and they start failing. Like when they first attempt to create a start-up.

And that’s where most of them retreat. They focus on things they can’t fail on, and ignore the other important things. They start to blame other things (like the school system). They procrastinate. They refuse to face new problems because they know they will not be able to handle them, and this does not fit into their worldview that they are invincible.

Conclusion:

Being intelligent is like having a knife. If you train every day in using the knife, you will be invincible. If you think that just having a knife will make you win any battle you fight, then you will fail. This believe in your own inherent ability is what will kill your start-up. Success comes from the work and ability you put in becoming better than the others, and not from some brilliance you feel you may have within you.

So don’t believe that the brilliance of your idea is what will make you successful. What will make you successful is when you are out there every day, doing something new, challenging yourself, trying new methods, studying new ways, having a lot of small failures, then getting better every day.