The answer to this question will differ, depending on whether the question is, “Can a person be too intelligent to achieve happiness?” or whether the question is “Can a person be too intelligent to achieve success?”
Can a person be too intelligent to achieve happiness?
The 18th-century poet Thomas Gray, coined the proverb, “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise,” suggesting that ignorance is sometimes preferable to awareness. When we see the unbridled joy experienced by a mentally-challenged person, who has achieved something that most of us regard as trivial, we might be prompted to wonder whether greater intelligence brings with it a heavier burden of awareness that leads to sadness or depression.
When it comes to achieving happiness, biographies of some of the world’s most brilliant people, reveal that extremely high intelligence can be a liability, because it is often accompanied by introversion, resulting in limited social skills, feelings of isolation, and a tendency toward depression. Alan Turing (featured in the movie The Imitation Game), Ludwig Boltzmann (developer of statistical mechanics in quantum physics), and Yutaka Taniyama (known for the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture) committed suicide at ages 41, 62, and 31 respectively. Mathematicians like Kurt Gödel (known for his incompleteness theorems) and Georg Cantor (developer of set theory and transfinite numbers) both grappled with episodes of insanity that ultimately led to their death. The unhappiness experienced by many highly intelligent individuals was captured by Einstein in his tribute to Max Planck:* (reference given below)
One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness. Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
Of course, many other highly intelligent individuals are able to achieve relatively happy lives, by avoiding the dangers that come with the heightened awareness of the irrelevance of human existence.
Can a person be too intelligent to achieve success?
The greatest threat to the success of a highly intelligent person is also their greatest asset in achieving success–their difference from the rest of humanity. We in a world where most people travel in a circular orbit around a centre that we call “average” or “normal.” Most people adopt the consensus of the tribes to which they belong, because they don’t feel confident enough in their intelligence to deviate dramatically from the norms. Highly intelligent people, on the other hand, aware of their intellectual powers, form their opinions independent of others, relying on their own observations and challenging accepted beliefs. Such people orbit in eccentric trajectories around a focus different from the centre of the normal circular orbits. For example, brilliant people like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Gödel and Einstein were seen as heretics at worst or weird and strange at best. The greatest threat to their achieving success was their perceived difference, often resulting in ostracism, persecution and sometimes death.
However, these highly intelligent people are the ones who create new paradigms, new cures for disease and new technologies that serve us all. If they cannot escape the persecution they suffer for their difference, they may be said to be, “too smart for their own good.” However, if they can move past the social resistance, then we can conclude that they were not “too intelligent to achieve success.”
There is probably no way to determine in advance whether you are not intelligent enough or too intelligent to achieve success in any particular endeavor. The best way is to pour yourself into your passion, work intensely to achieve your goals and then monitor your progress. Since hard work is a major component of every success, you cannot know your prospects until you’ve invested that effort. The danger that you are too intelligent to achieve success can be nullified by acquiring some social skills during your journey.
Reference: The quote from Einstein: see Isaacson, Walter. 2007. Einstein: His Life & Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 233.
