The greatest downside to knowing your IQ on a standardized IQ test is that it may cause you to put a ceiling on your personal expectations We must remember that an IQ test is a brief snapshot of some of your cognitive skills– a snapshot that has a reasonably large margin of error.
Scoring 110 on an IQ test may convince you that you are not exceptionally intelligent and that you are not able to pursue a goal that you wished to attain. However, achievement in life involves a lot of things not measurable on an IQ test. Intensity of purpose, passion, imagination and long-term problem solving skills are things that are not measurable on IQ tests.
You must think of an IQ test score as one of several indicators that provide a rough approximation of your cognitive ability. Other important indicators are the ease at which you learned ideas in school, the level of your interests in the mysteries of life and the comfort you feel in learning new things. Highly intelligent people are interested in a wide variety of subjects including philosophy, literature, history, the arts, science and even some mathematics. If you are excited by the prospect of learning in these areas, then the results of an IQ test are not to be taken too seriously.
However, if your main interest lies in social media, reading about the celebrities and visiting monster truck rallies, the IQ test may be telling you something. The “take-home” message is this: if you are passionate about what you want to achieve, then go for it with every atom of energy you can summon, and results of an IQ test will become irrelevant.
