The answer to this question depends upon your definition of success. A famous postcard circulated in the early part of the last century carried the caption, “If you’re so damn smart, why ain’t you rich.” Implicit in this question was the assumption that success is synonymous with the accumulation of wealth. It is probably true that the smartest person in the classroom does not ultimately become the richest, and there are reasons for this that I will address later in this response. First, I’ll address the converse question: “Were today’s richest people the smartest people in the classroom?” The following table (pilfered from my book on Intelligence and IQ) shows that the ten richest people in the world, as identified by CEOWORLD Magazine on February 28, 2020, had high or very high IQ’s and in most cases, high SAT scores.
Yet, as brilliant as these entrepreneurs are, there are others who register higher on the “book smarts” scale. Biographer Mark Leibovich, (The New Imperialists: How Five Restless Kids Grew Up to Virtually Rule the World. p. 78) describing a career-changing moment in the life of Jeff Bezos, reports:
One night during his freshman year, [Jeff] 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,” [Jeff] 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 he [Jeff] was not one of those people. “It was initially devastating,” he says, “very, very, troubling.”
In Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, Gates’ biographers James Wallace and Jim Erickson describe his ruminations as he contemplated his future:
At Lakeside, [High School] Gates had been the best student in the school at math. Even at Harvard, he was one of the top math students. But he was not the best. … “I met several people in the math department who were quite a bit better than I was at math. It changed my view about going into math. You can persevere in the field of math and make incredible breakthroughs, but it probably discouraged me. It made the odds much longer that I could do some world-class thing. I had to really think about it. Hey, I’m going to sit in a room, staring at a wall for five years, and even if I come up with something, who knows. So it made me think about whether math was something I wanted to do or not.”
These insights into the psyches of Bezos and Gates reveal the intensity of the competitive spirit felt by those Hi-Q people at the top of the scale. Like Professor Lambeau in the movie, Good Will Hunting, they are not focussed on the 99.999% of the people below them in IQ, but on the 0.001% above them. Yet, if these household-name superstar billionaires, are driven out of academe by people who are more gifted in analytical thinking, where are the people at the top of the Hi-Q heap?
Many of the smartest people in the classroom do not identify success in terms of accumulated wealth; they are responding to a different calling. My research has led me to explore the goals and destinations of this distinguished demographic and I’ll report on their fascinating individual success stories in a future post. As Thoreau observed, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
