In Malcolm Gladwell’s wonderful new book “,” the notion of genius and its correlation with success is fascinatingly disassembled. It’s not exactly news that having a high IQ does not guarantee that you’ll be successful in life. It’s one of the first things they tell you when you try to apply to MENSA after all. But what’s great about Gladwell’s take on it is that he’s more specific. IQ does matter, but only up to a certain point. It’s much easier to correlate success when you’re comparing someone with an IQ of 100 (a little below what you’d need to appreciate college) with someone with an IQ of 130 (approaching the “gifted” threshold). However, it doesn’t seem to matter as much beyond 130. Here’s the killer snippet:
“A mature scientist with an IQ of 130 is as likely to win the Nobel Prize as a scientist with an IQ of 180.”
The idea that resonated most with me is that if you are naturally gifted with a high IQ (and 130 is by no means “exceptionally high,” it’s just above average), it doesn’t matter that you could be competing with real one-in-a-million geniuses one day. Beyond 130, the disparity becomes almost insignificant.
So what does matter, past that 130-IQ boundary? Social skills, it turns out. The term Gladwell uses (and he’s really quoting Robert Sternberg here) is “Practical Intelligence,” which is explained thusly:
“It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. [...] It’s knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want.”
Even more interesting is the fact that general intelligence (what we measure with IQ) and practical intelligence are “orthogonal,” i.e., the presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other. I think we’ve all met really smart people whose personalities are disappointingly flat. They come off as socially awkward, or just plain abrasive. We can’t imagine them making any kind of dent in society because they don’t have the skills necessary to communicate the things going on in their heads. Gladwell’s theories validate that feeling.
I haven’t finished “Outliers” off as I write this, but it’s shaping up to be my favorite of his three books. There’s a fascinating exposition about the 10,000 hour rule (i.e., how many hours of practice it takes for a human to become an expert in something), and how the most brilliant minds of the past few centuries all managed to finish off their 10,000 hours at a pace faster than most anyone else in their field. There’s another great chapter wherein he theorizes that most star athletes are born between January and March, and another where he posits that the school that you go to is not nearly as important to your later success as some people think. I highly recommend that people check this book out; it’s a great read and is a really interesting new way to think about success and the things we do to achieve it.