Your high IQ will kill your startup

You need to know when to work hard, specially if you are chasing a dream. I dream to go to a research university, either next year, or three years from now after community college. What has held me back has been my contempt at hard work. Intelligence is always earned through work. It is not a knife; it is extra training.

They are mystified that such a lazy person could be so smart, so they say they were born that way. Of course, what you fail to mention is that any startup is almost certain to have to sell its product to people who are less intelligent than the startup founder s. That means the process involves a certain amount of con artistry as well as intelligence.

Intelligent people are not ideal producers of necessities — food farmers , shelter carpenters , clothing seamstresses. Intelligent people produce clever novelties that less intelligent people have to be artfully persuaded to buy. Sometimes intelligent people resort to sheer criminal trickery — like buying impossible to pay mortgages and hiding them in complex deals then selling them to someone else with a wink. If you got an A in a test cheating, you are considered the best. On the other hand if you hard work studing for it, you are considered a sucker. Your story rings true. In fact, research about kids and schools indicate it gets at a fundamental truth.

She makes a point that I think is consonant with your post: What a young student decides to do with this extra time can have a lot to do with their future success in life. In fact, high intelligence children more typically learn to act out, zone out, pretend to be less smart, or be perfectionists.

I have experienced some of those school dynamics myself, but also saw the truth of this when I was a CEO in the Boston area. There are lots of them, working away, having great and satisfying lives. Just like a knife, intelligence is a tool more than it is a weapon.

I think that somehow school plays a great hand in making intelligent people lazy. If you have a high IQ and you work hard then you have a much greater chance to succeed!

Your high IQ will kill your startup – RightBrain Networks

I also see many other business owners having mote success than I am, but they are doing things wrong or they are stupid. So that is how my intelligence gets in the way and ruins my startup. Will that save me from cancer or prevent car accident? Help to find love or true friends?

Will that give my life a meaning? So — to conclude — many intelligent people see there is no reason to put a lot of effort in things other people consider very important namely: The real problem is the school-system, which is unable to demand effort of those who are more gifted then others.

It is built to support meriocrity. If high iq children would be compelled to actually work, we would be able to unlock a big potential for our society. I call for a system, that is able to require effort from, those children who, properly educated, have the biggest potential to aid society. Sure, i use my common sense and i have my own sense of intelligence.

But at the same time, I am not hard working, yet i receive good grades. I am currently in my second year of high school and i completely agree with your article. Wow, that is brilliant! Well said and a good lesson. That was exactly what I needed to hear. Edison was a hack and a thief. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor. I remember the days when I would just slack off because I could afford to. This only returned later on to bite me.

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Now, I strongly advocate learning something new, everyday. You just might get lazy. Both the example people in this post seems to be jews. The author thinks that jewish start ups succeed because jews work hard, but from observation it is the control of money supply in USA and Europe that allow mediocre Jewish start ups to succeed, remove the money supply control from jews and they will become like any other minority group. As you said—if the man had trained to use a knife, he would have destroyed your friend. An excellent little piece of writing on something I struggle with myself and constantly acknowledge.

JPublic, are you German by any chance? Adam, don't confuse procrastinating and doing little work with sprezzatura. Sometimes, things are just easier for the more talented. It makes the hand bleed that uses it. Seein as how the author seems to think it relevant I presume the mugger in Brazilwas neither of Moroccan Jewish descent nor a peace loving Israeli soldier. I think there is a lot of truth in this article, and I think it starts out with a valuable analogy, but I think the conclusion overemphasizes hard work and misses the key point.

I think the key to success is more than just dedication and hard work. Entrepreneurs are often faced with a staggering amount of options and at any given point have dozens of things that seem important that they could be working on; by nature, startups are very open-ended. Quality is much more important than quantity. Work hard but put a cap on the number of hours you work.

Spend time with your friends, hobbies, exercising, reading about unrelated things, etc. Keep a balanced life. The irony is that these other parts of life will be a source of creativity, insight, and perspective. You solve them by doing other seemingly unrelated things. Ultimately, these things will help you make the key realizations that lead to the success of your business. This is too true. I am one of the recovering smart people.

It would actually be easier if I had a family to support. I enjoyed this essay and it was easy to see evidence of what it suggests in my past. I think that the fundamental message is that self-reflection is essential to continued growth. Your tools are only as valuable as your ability to use them. As the spectrum of tools and challenges grows, those who are unwilling to look critically upon their abilities will be outpaced by those who recognize weaknesses and take initiative to improve thereupon.

Instead, the author gives this real-world occurrence as an example to argue a more broad point. The author does not suggest confronting knife-wielding Brazilians either; instead it is suggested that it is important to reflect upon the combined value of your tools and your ability to use them. Very interesting article and very inspirational! I was walking in the business district; I wore all of my silk. I got this silk from my pantry. An old merchant asked me the secret to my success. I barely even recall how I became familiar with the concept. It was the highlight of my day. Later that night I was really giving it to my wife.

Really letting her have it.

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Why is this happening? Keep working, keep driven, keep learning new disciplines and have a good time doing it so you continually like learning new things and doing new projects. When I was 18, I had it easy at school. In our class, I was considered one of the best, never studied for an exam, etc. A rather normal guy on everything else, friends, sports, just really had it easy when it came down to studying.

Did I get dumber? It took me quite some time to catch up. Not bad, but in no way as outstanding as I set out to do. Nowadays, I really, really praise the kind of intelligence that allows you to enforce self-discipline, organization and life planning. But pure IQ alone will get you nowhere. Intelligence without willpower and perseverance is just a fancy way to be stupid. If you have to choose between intelligence and willpower, the later is far more relevant on a daily basis.

If they fail to realize this, are they really intelligent? For me this rang very true to my own experience. School was always fairly easy for me until my Upper Division years at college and graduate school. I now believe that the ability to work very hard for long periods of time is a form of ability similar to intelligence that is part genetic but can also be nurtured by parents.

That being said when you start talking about start-ups and extreme examples of success I think luck and connections play a significant part in whether someone will reach the highest pinnacle of success. You can only do your best to maximize the probability of success and working hard is one component of this. Depending on the school system, those with high IQ could be great at doing few things that require their brain power, while they could be very bad at things that require more social skills, physical coordination, or maybe artistic.

If the school is designed to measure grades on multiple aspects of intelligence, this person with high IQ may not have good grades in overall. They will get bored with the mundane tasks of school, and wander around with other things outside school. This kind of people are usually very great at few things, but very bad at other things. They will only focus on courses that they felt is aligned to their way of thinking, and ignore or being lazy with the rest.

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At work, they could have the potential to be bad at teamwork, because they may have less tolerance for different way of thinking. Very few of them will choose engineering as a career. I beat you to it… see my comment above. As a Mensa member, I can tell you both from my own experience and from the experience of others, that for most of us, school for the intelligent is not at all what you envision it to be for us.

It has also been shown there is a definite relationship between intelligence and depression. Does anyone see how absurdly disconnected to the idea of starts-up this article is. Intelligence is like a knife. If you are intelligent, you are at a clear advantage against people who are not intelligent.

But if you are intelligent, and another person is not as intelligent, but the other person is willing to train harder than you, the other person will very quickly overtake you in ability. People who are born intelligent start off life with everything easy for them. The major challenge of early life is school??? 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 startup. They focus on things they can??? They start to blame other things like the school system. 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. Let me tell another story. In , I had dinner with the father of my girlfriend in Paris. He is currently a vice president at one of the top 5 consulting companies in the world. He is a jewish french immigrant from Morroco???

How did you do it? How did you start from being an immigrant to become executive material? I wasn't aware of it HN should give a hint of resubmitted content as Reddit does: I do this before I post: DeusExMachina on July 22, I look for the direct link, in case the title was changed: RBerenguel on July 28, I'll try to remember doing it from now on. I always thought HN had a "no duplicates" search like reddit does.

Your high IQ will kill your startup

It pays to be smart eh? It seems it also kills blog posts. This was already posted, debated. It was part of a two week session of people posting about how being smart was a detriment to one's ability to be successful The title of this article is absolutely irrelevant to the actual arguments presented therein.