What Traits do High IQ people Share?
Most people would agree that Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr. and Benjamin Franklin were highly intelligent people. All had a high degree of self-efficacy, believing in their vision even when it ran contrary to consensus.
Albert Einstein’s assertions that time is not absolute and gravity is related to the geometry of space around masses were ridiculed by some and dismissed by many. Tesla’s insistence that alternating current was superior to direct current as a basis for the electrical grid was attacked by Edison and others. Churchill’s warnings about the threat posed by Stalin were ignored and he was voted out of power by a war-weary British electorate in 1945.
Each of these highly intelligent people was able to stand alone against consensus and pursue their own vision, while recognizing their personal fallibility. When young scientists presented experimental evidence that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was correct, the old man as he viewed the presentation would shake his head and utter, “Ist das wirklich so?” (Is that really true?) He held his theories in abeyance until they were verified by experiment. Similarly, Ben Franklin once stated in Poor Richard’s Almanack,“ None but the well-bred man knows how to confess a fault or acknowledge himself in an error.”
Such self-efficacy comes from an awareness of one’s intellectual gifts and a willingness to trust oneself against widespread opposition. However, those who are highly intelligent are usually intelligent enough to recognize that they may be wrong. Kipling captured this in his famous poem, IF, “If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.” This recognition of personal fallibility is manifest in the highly intelligent in an openness to dissenting opinion and a willingness to listen to opposing arguments. Absolute certainty and dogmatic adherence to a specific point of view or belief is the province of people of much lower intelligence, not the intellectually gifted. Steve Jobs, when asked how he identified intelligent people, described them as open to a wide panorama of different ideas.
What do Hi-Q people think of those who have lesser IQ?
Those Hi-Q people who are concerned about IQ and intelligence are not focussed on those of lower intelligence, but rather on those of higher intelligence, because it will be those with whom they will need to compete in the achievement of their goals. An example of the competitive fervour experienced by those in the top intellectual echelon was captured in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. When Fields Medalist, Professor Gerald Lambeau, acknowledges that the young janitor at the University, named Will Hunting [played by Matt Damon] has superior mathematical talent, he says:
I can’t do this proof. But you can, and when it comes to that it’s only about, … it’s just a handful of people in the world who can tell the difference between you and me. But I’m one of them… Most days I wish I never met you… Because then I could sleep at night, and I wouldn’t have to walk around with the knowledge that there’s someone like you out there… And I didn’t have to watch you throw it all away.
Similarly, Jeff Bezos, a short time after arriving at Princeton, discovered that for the first time in his life he was not the most gifted student in the class. Biographer Mark Leibovich reported an interesting turning point in the direction of his career path:
One night during his freshman year, Bezos was struggling over a partial differential equation he had to complete for a quantum mechanics class. After a few hours of frustration, he and his study partner visited the dorm room of a classmate, who glanced at the equation and said, “Cosine.”
“After we expressed some incredulousness,” Bezos says, “he proceeded to draw three pages of equations that flowed through and showed that it was cosine.” It led to a realization: There were people whose brains were wired to process abstract concepts in a very graceful way, and Bezos was not one of those people. “It was initially devastating,” he says, “very, very, troubling.”
These are only a couple of examples, but they match what I have observed in my colleagues in mathematical research. Intelligence is the Holy Grail of those who seek to solve the problems that no one else has been able to solve. In their ascent into the stratosphere of achievement, Hi-Q people are less concerned about those below them on the intellectual spectrum and more focussed on what they can achieve with their own cognitive abilities.
