Many academically intelligent people succeed brilliantly in life, while others perform modestly, and still others achieve little and live an unfulfilling life. Those who win Nobel Prizes, become billionaire entrepreneurs or world-class surgeons, almost always come from the academically intelligent class of people.
Furthermore, many of those who enjoy lives of quality, fulfilled by family, friends and less dramatic achievement or wealth also come from the class of people who performed well academically during their education. However, there are also those who are academically intelligent, yet seem to be unable to obtain a satisfying and fulfilling quality of life.
Sometimes these people fail for the same reasons that everyone else fails, such as a lack of self-discipline and the inability to postpone immediate gratification. In the worst case scenarios, this leads to addiction to drugs or alcohol. I have known several people with remarkable intellectual potential, who squandered their innate talent because they couldn’t postpone their “fun” long enough to complete tasks. In some cases, they dropped out of school; in other cases, they fell into poor relationships that led them into a profligate lifestyle. Academically intelligent people in the lower socioeconomic classes run the risk of becoming involved with the wrong people, while the academically intelligent people in the higher socioeconomic classes, who have been over-indulged in their childhood, often fail to develop a work ethic.
In an article titled, The Smartest Man in America, and published in 1999 by Esquire Magazine, author Mike Sager discussed his interviews with individuals of extremely high IQ. The man to whom he assigned the moniker “the smartest man in America” was Chris Langan, 8 years before he won $250,000 on the 1 vs. 100 quiz show. At the time of the interview, Chris was 47 years of age, earning about $6000 a year and living in a cramped and cluttered one-room cabin in Eastport, Long Island. Langan who had begun talking at age 6 months, was extremely precocious and started school in grade 3 at the age of 3.
Though richly endowed with cognitive gifts, Chris was not gifted with a nurturing home environment. His mother had four sons by four different husbands. The first husband, Chris’s father, disappeared before Chris was born. The second husband was murdered, the third committed suicide, and the fourth, Jack Langan was an alcoholic who beat his sons on a regular basis. To defend himself and his two brothers, Chris took up weight lifting and by age 14, defended himself in a physical altercation that sent his abusive stepfather packing for good. The family lived below the poverty line, moving across the country to support their hand-to-mouth existence. Troubled experiences during his formative years, combined with the social detachment that often accompanies cognitive giftedness, made it difficult for Chris to navigate the challenges of human interaction. This social ineptness would later alter significantly the trajectory of his life. Fortunately, Chris was able to straighten out his life and eventually met and married Gina LoSasso, another academically intelligent person who had also suffered a series of life-alterning setbacks. Today they have salvaged more fulfilling lives and live together on a horse farm in Montana.
In their journey through life, academically intelligent people often meet social challenges that result from their intellectual difference, and how they cope with these challenges often hinges on the environment in their formative years as well as the wild card that we call “luck.” As Shakespeare observed:
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
Those of us who are living, happy, fulfilled and successful lives, usually attribute this status to our hard work and self-discipline but we sometimes forget that we were also lucky to be born in a country of high opportunity at a lucky time in history.
