The self-esteem of high IQ individuals spans the full range from low self-esteem to high self-esteem. Many very high IQ people have low self-esteem because they compare themselves to those at the top of the IQ scale. The great physicist, Paul Ehrenfest, who collaborated with Einstein and found a contradiction in the equivalence principle, committed suicide because he felt he could no longer understand with enough clarity, the new abstract formulations of the general theory and quantum physics.
By contrast, when Jeff Bezos was studying mathematics at Princeton and saw how easily fellow student Yasantha Rajakarunanayake processed differential equations, he immediately transferred into electrical engineering and computer science. (For the full story, see: Jeff Bezos – Intelligence and IQ ) Jeff, a very high IQ person accepted that there are other people who may have an even higher IQ, but retained his high self-esteem and harnessed it in the pursuit of his dream to create Amazon.
The potential for a high IQ is a genetic gift, but it requires a nurturing and stimulating environment to come to fruition. Some people of high IQ discover early in life that their interests, humour and mode of thinking are different from most others. This difference sometimes results in their isolation from their peers at school and the feeling that they don’t “fit in.” The harder they try to be accepted by the “cool” people, the more they feel rejection, often causing them to turn inward, resulting in low self-esteem.
Others of high IQ seek out people of like mind and join a group of high IQ individuals to meet their social needs. They see their ability to learn quickly as an advantage and this increases their self-esteem. However, like sprinters in a 100-m dash, they are very much aware of who is ahead of them and relatively unaware of those who are behind. Their high self-esteem may make them competitive with those at the top, and it merely fuels their ambition.
