A few years before I had my first IQ test, I came to believe that I had superior intelligence. I had stood first in the early grades and was skipped from Grade 3 into Grade 5, joining a cohort that was a year or two older than I. The first IQ test that I took was administered by a teacher from the Guidance Department when I was in Grade 9. Since I enjoyed math puzzles, checkers, and chess, the test was an enjoyable experience and I finished just before the examiner called “time’s up”. In those days, no one told you your IQ score so I was never given a number. (I suspect that somewhere on this planet, my IQ score is locked in a hermetically-sealed vault along with the IQs of my cohort.) However, a few days after the test, my high school teachers were giving me special treatment, asking me about my career aspirations and providing me with textbooks from their university days. The next year, a group of us were put in a streamed class and given the teachers with the strongest academic credentials. My classmates and I increasingly felt that we were intellectually special and we competed for highest honors. My behavior changed from a tacit acceptance of an intellectual advantage to a belief that I could surmount any intellectual mountain. When I exuded the typical teenage cockiness, my father would invoke the metaphor of the gunslinger showdown, advising me in his Irish brogue, “I’ll tell ya lad, der’s always a faster gun.”
When I entered the Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry program at the University of Toronto, I discovered that there were, indeed, a lot of fast guns in the IQ shootout. By the time I completed a Ph.D. in number theory, I realized that the concept of intelligence is much broader than IQ. In the decades that followed, I came to understand the limitations of my cognitive reach and the arrogance of my youth has mostly diminished, though I still love an intellectual challenge. This change in perspective has brought a change in my behavior and I’ve become more aware of the many talents of the people around me–talents that differ in kind and in magnitude. It is now clear to me that everyone, no matter their IQ or their educational background, has something to teach me. Belief that I had a high IQ empowered me, but experience taught me about its limitations. I am currently writing a chapter about the blunders of the most brilliant people on the planet.
