Yes. Your intelligence is a very significant part of who you are: your abilities, your perspectives, and your capacity to understand existential issues. With high intelligence, you can learn most things very quickly and your curiosity provides a continuous renewal of your interest in life. If you delve into a particular passion and make it a career, you will earn enough to live comfortably. If you choose to accumulate significant wealth, the probabilities are on your side.
Of course, if you are brilliant, you will have challenges that you must overcome. Your interests, opinions, and perspectives will differ substantially from most people. You will often be shunned by others, perceived as weird and excluded from social groups. Rudyard Kipling once asserted, “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” However, if you have extremely high intelligence, you are likely able to deal with this challenge.
The advantages of great wealth are overestimated by those who are financially challenged. A person who is a wage slave, working in a boring semi-skilled or unskilled job, living from pay check to pay check often fantasizes about winning the lottery and becoming free of financial burdens. But such a person often fails to recognize that after all their financial worries disappear, other worries about relationships, health and personal fulfillment come to the fore. Having lots of possessions would seem to be a blueprint for happiness, but possessions, like luxurious villas and personal jets do not feed the soul. As Einstein opined, “Every possession is a stone around your leg.” By this, he meant that managing your possessions can sometimes undermine your happiness. While it’s important to have enough money to live comfortably, wealth beyond that point brings diminishing returns in terms of happiness.
As psychologist Abraham Maslow observed, the great joys and contentment in life come from self-actualization, i.e., engaging in some self-fulfilling passion, as well as sharing love with family and friends. Of course, it’s better to be rich than poor, but riches alone can fulfill only the lower levels in the hierarchy of human needs.
The “take home” message in a comparison of intelligence and wealth is that your intelligence plays a vital role in who you are, while wealth is only a measure of what you have.
