Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)

IMHO, to continually put &quot;success&quot; 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.<p>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.<p>When these goals are achieved, rarely does anyone publicly say that it wasn&#x27;t worth it. It&#x27;s like a bad marriage rotting from the inside. No one wants to admit to being a fool. So stuff like this propagate, it&#x27;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.<p>It&#x27;s like you think someone out there is keeping score, and it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t even remember more than bits and pieces, and then eventually die and forget it all.<p>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&#x27;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?<p>I&#x27;m not saying don&#x27;t try. Just make sure you are enjoying what you are doing, first and foremost. If you&#x27;re not happy, either motivate yourself in a positive way, or let it go. It really isn&#x27;t worth it.

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, &quot;Why do dumb people succeed more in business than smart people.&quot;<p>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.<p>But the last paragraph really summarized it best, &quot;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.&quot;<p>It gets back to the saying &quot;No risk &#x2F; No reward&quot;.<p>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.<p>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 took an important lesson from that article, completely unrelated to startups, when first reading it few years ago.<p>&gt; <i>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 (...)</i><p>You can have a false sense of confidence that because you possess a particular tool, you&#x27;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&#x27;d likely be much better of if you didn&#x27;t have that tool in the first place.<p>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&#x27;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 &quot;training&quot;, for her to see how it actually works, so that in case of real danger, she wouldn&#x27;t have to worry about how to use the gas and how it actually works.

aka <i>the tortoise and the hare</i> (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare</a>), or, for a more topical treatment <i>determination beats intelligence</i> (<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;determination.html</a>, <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;founders.html</a>)<p>It&#x27;s universal.<p>e.g. I&#x27;m not supersmart, but maybe halfway between supersmart and average - enough to have glimpses; to know what I&#x27;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&#x27;t effortlessly &quot;just grasp&quot;. I kept trying to &quot;just grasp&quot; them in different ways...<p>Now, finally, I&#x27;m attempting to build up my skills, one higher-level at a time. It&#x27;s ughhh because it makes me feel really stupid... but that&#x27;s just because I am. At least, relative to the task. I&#x27;m making progress. So I&#x27;ve got that going for me, which is nice.<p>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&#x27;re not a success unless you&#x27;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 &quot;citation please&quot; criticism of the post, I will. Sorry, but it&#x27;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.<p>Intuitively, I highly doubt such a relationship exists.<p>Otherwise, the article is basically making the observation that being &quot;successful&quot; in business is generally hard.<p>But it&#x27;s the internet, you can say whatever you want!

1. It would have been helpful to be more specific about what is meant by &quot;intelligence&quot;. I get the sense that it is referring to knowledge and&#x2F;or aptitude.<p>2. I think the message is, &quot;Intelligence isn&#x27;t enough. You also need perseverance to succeed.&quot; I don&#x27;t know if the implication is if those two conditions are necessary, or that they&#x27;re sufficient, but it sort of felt like it was saying that they&#x27;re sufficient. The examples seem like they were making the point that, once you add perseverance on to the intelligence, you get success.<p>Anyway, success is obviously more complicated than &quot;intelligence&quot; + perseverance. I&#x27;m sure the author knows this, but the article seemed to oversimplify things, and didn&#x27;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.

This reminds me a bit of a steve yegge quote.<p>&quot;Having a good memory is a serious impediment to understanding. It lets you cheat your way through life.&quot;<p>This also reminds me quite a bit of the famous conversation between Eric S. Raymond and Linus Torvalds about &quot;the curse of the gifted.&quot;

&quot;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 &#x27;Press On&#x27; has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.&quot;

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&#x27;t it be true, though? The history of similar stereotypes isn&#x27;t good; lazy and entitled is one of the all-time most popular stereotypes of any despised out-group, and I suspect it hasn&#x27;t been the go-to slander because it has a superior likelihood of turning out to be true and defensible. Here&#x27;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&#x27;s a group that, by definition, is distinguished by superiority, having as its sole determinant a very high IQ. It&#x27;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&#x27;m not familiar with the name Max Klein, and it&#x27;s such a combination of common names that it&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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.

I don&#x27;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.

The bit about clever people who have always found it easy to achieve rings true when you are working with training teachers.<p>They have problems with the teaching sometimes. These problems are not easy, scalar or well defined. There are no &#x27;textbook&#x27; solutions. Some cope with the messy reality well and some don&#x27;t.

Good article and reminder of how it is. To learn from our failures and hardships is where we grow the most.<p>IQ is only few percent of the total intelligence. But most people seem to see it as 99% so often.<p>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.<p><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fundamentally-flawed-and-using-them-alone-to-measure-intelligence-is-a-fallacy-study-finds-8425911.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;science&#x2F;iq-tests-are-funda...</a>

The title of this post<p>&gt; Your high IQ will kill your startup<p>is too strong to be correct: The claim of &quot;will kill&quot; is claiming too much; &#x27;might kill&#x27; is closer to being correct.<p>In more detail, the OP essentially assumes that an intelligent person will try to &#x27;coast&#x27; or &#x27;relax&#x27; 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.<p>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&#x2F;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.<p>I&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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.

Not everyone has a &quot;I just moved to a foreign country and have to make a living somehow&quot; moment.<p>Any <i></i>specific<i></i> advice for a person who found school easy and now has problems challenging themselves further in live?

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.<p>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.

I can&#x27;t help but have heard this story before, perhaps by an HN user in another thread in the past. Didn&#x27;t the Ofer fellow end up dieing in a robbery further down the line?

I have a nice counter example to this. I&#x27;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.<p>I also had the feeling though that some people are just magnets for trouble.<p>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.

Choosing to fight a man with a knife who is trying to rob you is stupid and dangerous, regardless of your training. I&#x27;m not sure what this says about the thesis.

To sound intentionally arrogant and possibly ignorant, this whole write-up is captain-obvious material.

What high IQ?

Reminds me of the military.

Good article.

The point the article makes is well understood and valid: even if you have the potential, if you don&#x27;t work hard to use it, you won&#x27;t develop the skills and discipline for success. All right.<p>But we don&#x27;t need to cast failures and flaws as the result of &quot;high intelligence&quot;. Just a few days ago we had an article about the &quot;curse of smart people&quot;. It feels like a bunch of people patting themselves on the back and telling themselves &quot;oh, we&#x27;re so intelligent, this is why we failed&quot;.<p>If intelligent people are so prone to failure, what is the purpose of measuring intelligence? Being stupid is bad, being average is bad, now being smart is also bad! Congratulations.<p>Part of the problem is the ease at which we proclaim ourselves &quot;very intelligent&quot;. Being good at school is not a sure sign of high intelligence - school is an artificial environment that values short-term memorizing of facts, over critical analysis and independent decision-making. You won&#x27;t go far in life with that, but maybe you&#x27;ll do well in quiz TV shows. Solving &quot;missing piece&quot; puzzles also isn&#x27;t a sign of high intelligence. All those are just a small part of it.<p>Can&#x27;t we agree &quot;intelligent&quot; is the skill of <i>setting good goals</i>, <i>achieving them</i>, and making <i>good decisions</i> in light of limited facts, limited time, and some stress, because <i>that&#x27;s what life is</i>, and move on to strive (and possibly measure) for that.

At first (before I RTFA) I was going to come here to disagree vehemently. There are severe founder-quality issues right now and a lot of that has to do with low-IQ people who failed out of banking or management consulting getting funded, while actually smart people with less social polish get fuck-all. 140+ IQ doesn&#x27;t mean much, but I&#x27;d fund a 140+ over a well-connected douchebag any day of the year. The problem is that so many not-smart people (Spiegel, Duplan) are getting funded and it&#x27;s generating such a slew of crap companies that the rising generation (Millennials) may have lost the knowledge necessary to build good ones.<p>Then I RTFA and found that I agree, wholeheartedly. The metaphor he gives is of an overconfident assailant who has a knife, but is untrained and is beaten by a bare-handed opponent.<p>Correctly, we assess our enemies in office politics as being stupider. That VP&#x2F;NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who-The-Fuck-Knows) doesn&#x27;t know what a monad is. He probably couldn&#x27;t write a for-loop to save his own dick. Those bikeshedding &quot;big picture guys&quot; who &quot;do product&quot; aren&#x27;t intellectually sophisticated people. All that said, they continue to beat the piss out of us in the game of office politics. They do nothing but, somehow, get paid twice as much and get to make a lot of decisions that we ought to be making. As a group, we have to stop fucking moping, figure out why, and change it.<p>Too many software engineers are so self-congratulatory about their intellectual ability, and too easily swayed by bullshit perks, to realize that they&#x27;re actually getting robbed blind by jerks in The Business who aren&#x27;t nearly as smart (they don&#x27;t have the knife) but who&#x27;ve been training at social machination and in dominating other people for as long as we&#x27;ve been studying computers.<p>We have to stop thinking it&#x27;s &quot;dirty&quot; or undignified or unprofessional to &quot;get political&quot; and figure out a way to get our due. We have to stop putting our heads in the sand and saying &quot;I just want to code&quot;. We are a hard-working group (even the smart ones work really hard) but we need to accept that some of that hard work is going to have to involve learning CS 666 (software politics), as ugly as the skill may be, and playing to win, to fucking demolish our enemies instead of having them defeat us.

Plenty of people are not &#x27;intelligent&#x27; and have no motivation.<p>Dinner with &#x27;vice president at one of the top 5 consulting companies in the world&#x27;.<p>That sounds like something out of:<p>&quot;Intelligent?!?! Read TOP 10 things that you are doing wrong right now!&quot;

I&#x27;m s glad to see an article like this on HN, as opposed to articles that attribute success to massive amounts of luck.

With odds at one in 176 million the only people who succeed in winning the lottery are those stupid enough to try.

This article is more about perseverance and hard work then it is about intelligence.

As someone with a high IQ, I can&#x27;t help but agree with this in its entirety. For those who thought this was too long, I can summarize it as thus: &quot;Don&#x27;t overthink things, and refine your brain power. An unrefined brain is a useless tool, no matter how smart you are.&quot;