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.
I completely disagree, and I believe this is harmful advice.
If you are poor, no amount of book reading will convince you that you do not need money. What will convince you is not being poor. Only then will you feel like you are able to give others advice about how money is not important: and your advice will be as useless to them as similar advice was to you when you first heard it (and rightly so).
People with low self-esteem do not improve their condition by thinking themselves into happiness or forcing themselves to believe that everything is awesome. They improve it by actively working on those areas of their lives they feel bad about. If they are lucky and work hard enough - they might reach a stage where they realize how warped their thinking was, and many of the things they thought they wanted will no longer seem important. But you cannot "skip" this journey and go straight into the land of happiness simply because somebody who is already happy told you what the view is like from the other side. You have to get there yourself, even if part of your journey is based on a lie.
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.
To this I would add: do work that pleases you, not work that leads to something you think will please you.
I was first introduced to this from one of the Indic texts - perhaps one of the Vedas - where people are told to do work and not worry about it's reward.
This is a good way to protect yourself from the folly that the parent poster describes.
> 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?
I've seen that blog posted here before. I'm pretty sure that in the original, the follow up post mentioned offhandedly, "Sadly, Ofer was killed by a robber..." without any reflection on his self defense philosophy.
I have meet a lot of wealthy/successful people and trust me, they are way more happy than the poorer people I have meet. They've achieved their dream and can continue doing so. They have traveled, they given back, they create things, they are loved and they're happy.
>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.
You're wrong about this one. The biggest regret for people on their death beds were having gone through life with goals unfulfilled. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five....
I've always found it funny how others like you label rich people as having a shit life. That they can't find true love and have to hire escorts etc.
Success is what makes you happy. That could be making a billion dollars or milking cows.
Most of people have huge dreams and goals they want to achieve, its just that most don't care and don't try.
>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?
Well yes, of course. Your ambition is the engine of the elite's profits.
I imagine to those of us are lucky enough to reach adulthood without any big hardship in life such a lifestyle can be very appealing, but unfortunately I reckon it's not how it typically plays out.
This entire viewpoint is based on the false premise that we are born and grow up unaffected by any financial, physical or psychological stress, living in a nice cushioned bubble, free to live our lives and to shape our future as we please. Unfortunately it doesn't always work out like that.
For everybody else (people who have been through difficult times in their lives, e.g. poverty, having suffered great losses, bullied in school, bad family etc..) success, as in being wealthy, influencial and attractive, is pretty much the only way to deal with life. Let's not forget that.
You can strip away the vaguely implied definition of "success" and replace it with arbitrary goal-attainment, and the central point still holds. Most of us have goals, so this is useful. Anyway, the word "startup" is right there in the title, so what were you expecting?
I read the article more like: IF you want to be successful, here is this great advice. Like you point out, being "successful" is not everything, nor necessarily related to being happy. That doesn't make the point in the article any less valid though.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
[+] [-] conroe64|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pavelrub|11 years ago|reply
If you are poor, no amount of book reading will convince you that you do not need money. What will convince you is not being poor. Only then will you feel like you are able to give others advice about how money is not important: and your advice will be as useless to them as similar advice was to you when you first heard it (and rightly so).
People with low self-esteem do not improve their condition by thinking themselves into happiness or forcing themselves to believe that everything is awesome. They improve it by actively working on those areas of their lives they feel bad about. If they are lucky and work hard enough - they might reach a stage where they realize how warped their thinking was, and many of the things they thought they wanted will no longer seem important. But you cannot "skip" this journey and go straight into the land of happiness simply because somebody who is already happy told you what the view is like from the other side. You have to get there yourself, even if part of your journey is based on a lie.
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ScottBurson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kghose|11 years ago|reply
I was first introduced to this from one of the Indic texts - perhaps one of the Vedas - where people are told to do work and not worry about it's reward.
This is a good way to protect yourself from the folly that the parent poster describes.
[+] [-] aprrrr|11 years ago|reply
I've seen that blog posted here before. I'm pretty sure that in the original, the follow up post mentioned offhandedly, "Sadly, Ofer was killed by a robber..." without any reflection on his self defense philosophy.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jamesfranco|11 years ago|reply
I have meet a lot of wealthy/successful people and trust me, they are way more happy than the poorer people I have meet. They've achieved their dream and can continue doing so. They have traveled, they given back, they create things, they are loved and they're happy.
>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. You're wrong about this one. The biggest regret for people on their death beds were having gone through life with goals unfulfilled. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five....
I've always found it funny how others like you label rich people as having a shit life. That they can't find true love and have to hire escorts etc.
Success is what makes you happy. That could be making a billion dollars or milking cows.
Most of people have huge dreams and goals they want to achieve, its just that most don't care and don't try.
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|11 years ago|reply
Well yes, of course. Your ambition is the engine of the elite's profits.
[+] [-] rsp1984|11 years ago|reply
This entire viewpoint is based on the false premise that we are born and grow up unaffected by any financial, physical or psychological stress, living in a nice cushioned bubble, free to live our lives and to shape our future as we please. Unfortunately it doesn't always work out like that.
For everybody else (people who have been through difficult times in their lives, e.g. poverty, having suffered great losses, bullied in school, bad family etc..) success, as in being wealthy, influencial and attractive, is pretty much the only way to deal with life. Let's not forget that.
[+] [-] andrewflnr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Panoramix|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcosscriven|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bocalogic|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
> 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|11 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] hyp0|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
http://lwn.net/2000/0824/a/esr-sharing.php3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221756
[+] [-] underwater|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiotapia|11 years ago|reply
I have different goals. I'd rather earn 80 a year and work 9-to-5 than slave away at work.
[+] [-] b1daly|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
2. Think he meant necessary.
[+] [-] funkyy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fizz_ed|11 years ago|reply
"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|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] judk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtdewcmu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwaltrip|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtdewcmu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randallsquared|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewflnr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithpeter|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] graycat|11 years ago|reply
> 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|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
Any specific advice for a person who found school easy and now has problems challenging themselves further in live?
[+] [-] nmrm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nadam|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coryl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] junto|11 years ago|reply
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.