Feeling Stupid? You May be Focused on the Wrong Things
A guide to transcending your IQ
Am I stupid?
It’s a fair question.
It’s not the first time I’ve felt like I wasn’t the brightest tool in the shed. See that’s not even the right expression.
I’ve lost more chess matches than I’ve won, I once referred to my boss as “mom”, and I tell people I really liked the movie Tenet, but I didn’t really understand it.
More importantly though, I can’t seem to figure out what I’m good at.
Every time I foray into the internet world, I see a sea of brilliant creators teaching courses, making people laugh or impressing audiences with wit, skill and consistency.
How did these people actually make some thing? And why can’t I seemingly make anything?
There are people out there mixing croissants with donuts, building rocket ships, and even organizing successful pyramid schemes; passionate people who’ve figured out their calling and what to offer the rest of the world.
Me on the other hand…I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I’m 35.
Are they smart? And am I stupid?
Examining IQ
The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about intelligence is the Intelligence Quotient aka IQ.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, IQ is a standardized score that measures general intelligence based on a set of tests in abstract reasoning.
What is either extremely fortunate for you or extremely unfair is that IQ is an all-or-nothing ability, meaning that if you’re skilled in one type of mental task, you’re going to perform well in all mental tasks. It also works the other way. If you’re not good at one mental task, well, you get the point.
While not perfect, the IQ test is still one of the best predictors of achievement. There are a number of studies that produce charts like the ones below, showing strong correlation between IQ and things like academic achievement and wealth.
Thinking about IQ can be kind of depressing because it’s not something you can easily change — if at all.
As the chart below shows, there is a high correlation of intelligence scores for people tested at 11 and again at 90 years old.
What this suggests is that while your intelligence can fluctuate within a certain range, your IQ is largely pre-determined by genetic factors. Sorry, those supplements and brain-training games aren’t going to help you much.
So to recap: IQ is very important in predicting wealth and academic/career achievement, which in turn predicts general well being…and it isn’t something you can really influence as an individual.
Bummer.
So what does this knowledge portend for me now? If I do find out that I have a low-to-average IQ and can’t really change it, should I start to feel down about myself?
Freeing Yourself from IQ
The semi-fixed nature of IQ is a little depressing but there is a silver lining.
The first thing to know is that IQ is an important variable in predicting achievement and well-being but it isn’t the only one. And even though it’s the largest factor, this amounts to explaining roughly only 25% of the variation in outcomes like test scores or income.
The relationship between IQ and success is a statistical one, not a deterministic one. In other words, having a high IQ doesn’t guarantee better outcomes in life while having a low-to-average IQ doesn’t disqualify you from living a fulfilling life.
The chart below does a good job illustrating the probabilistic relationship between IQ and professions. Some professions, likely higher-paying ones, do have higher averages for IQ levels. However, each profession still exhibits a pretty wide range of IQ levels.
In his Vox article, Scott Alexander writes:
The chart perfectly demonstrates how IQ is both statistically reliable and individually unreliable. On average, intellectually demanding occupations like college professors have higher IQs than less demanding occupations like janitors. But individual janitors are sometimes higher-IQ than individual college professors. And almost every profession draws from a wide range of IQs. The average professor is pretty smart — but a nontrivial number have below-average IQs. Like [Gary] Kasparov, they probably have some areas where their natural talent greatly exceeds what their IQ would predict — and like Kasparov, they probably supplemented that by working really hard.
And it turns out IQ may not even be just a single measure. Writing for Neuron, Roger Highfield describes a study in which an IQ test was segmented into further subcomponents. What his team discovered was that IQ test scores comprised at least three independent components: short-term memory, reasoning, and the verbal factor.
He goes on to write:
We wanted to be sure. Did the three factors activate three separate brain circuits? Hampshire used MRI to study the brains of 16 participants. Each of the three different factors identified by the principal-components analysis did indeed correspond to a different brain network.
There is also one important meta question to ask about my original question of “Am I stupid?” And the question is “do I actually care about my intelligence or do I care more about how my perception of my intelligence makes me feel?”
Well-being, not IQ is what we actually care about
If we were able to be completely blissful with an average IQ, I don’t think we would spend much time lamenting our intelligence.
We care about IQ because we want to feel a certain satisfaction in our life. As we saw above, IQ does lead to better well-being by enabling us to acquire the social status and financial means which ensure better opportunities and quality of life.
However, according to a recent study on intelligence and happiness, when adjusting for socioeconomic status, the relationship between IQ and well-being starts to diminish.
The same study also concluded that another characteristic was more important for determining well-being, even after adjusting for socioeconomic status factors — managing emotions.
From the article covering the study:
Emotional intelligence had a direct effect on well-being, and this association remained strong even after controlling for SES. What’s more, of the two measures of intelligence — IQ and emotional intelligence — emotional intelligence was the strongest predictor of well-being, outweighing not only IQ, but also a person’s SES and age. This finding suggests that emotional intelligence — particularly the capacity to manage one’s emotions toward optimal personal goal attainment — is a form of intelligence that can help people live a more fulfilled life regardless of their economic circumstances.
Another non-IQ based predictor of well-being? Conscientiousness.
Conscientiousness is a personality trait (one of the Big Five) that describes a person’s ability to be hard-working, organized and goal-oriented. In multiple studies, conscientiousness has been shown to be an important predictor of success but also weakly correlated with IQ. This means that you don’t have to be smart to be dedicated and being dedicated can pay off.
So there you have it.
Want to feel smarter? Follow your heart and stick to it.
Everybody wants to feel smart. But in our internet age, we now have to compare ourselves not just to our peers but to the entire world when trying to evaluate where we stand in terms of intelligence, beauty, wealth and everything else.
This rising tide of exposure to everything that everyone is doing can put a lot of pressure on our confidence and satisfaction with ourselves.
So if you want to feel smarter, according to Raj Raghunathan, professor of marketing at The University of Texas, the first thing you should do is drop the social comparisons.
The need to be better — to judge your satisfaction in relation to others — imposes a set of external criteria by which you compare yourself. People start gravitating towards things like salary, accolades, and status, which, in their mind, serve as hard evidence for their worth.
There’s two problems with this type of thinking.
The first is that the satisfaction gained from hitting milestones like getting a promotion or winning a contest is short-lived. Once we get over the initial high, we get used to our new status and start looking for that next rush.
The second problem is that by focusing on these external milestones, we lose sight of what brings us emotional well-being. In other words, we become too busy working towards the things we think we want versus actually doing the things we want to do.
In his interview with Joe Pinsker of The Atlantic, Raj states:
What I recommend is an alternative approach [to comparative thinking], which is to become a little more aware of what it is that you’re really good at, and what you enjoy doing. When you don’t need to compare yourself to other people, you gravitate towards things that you instinctively enjoy doing, and you’re good at, and if you just focus on that for a long enough time, then chances are very, very high that you’re going to progress towards mastery anyway.
Wrapping up
While you cannot sharply change your IQ just yet, if you want to feel smarter and have a better sense of accomplishment, focus on the three non-IQ skills that are known to correspond to well-being:
- Emotional control: The ability to not get too down during challenging times and to not be blinded by euphoria during good times.
- Self-awareness: the ability to understand your desires and motives.
- Consistency (conscientiousness): the ability to keep working towards your goals.
And remember to not shackle your happiness to outcomes. As Raj points out, the reason why it’s important to not tie happiness to outcomes is that outcomes by themselves don’t really have an unambiguously positive or negative effect on your happiness.