Is it just me, or have there been an awful lot of career-advice articles in social media about “X is more important than IQ for career success”? The articles are usually about a specific attribute that truly moves people forward to accomplish life goals. But on closer examination, general intelligence can be brought to bear on all of these “more important” attributes such that IQ is the true cornerstone.
Leadernomics.com has a great infographic about eight things that are more important than IQ for career success. Those items are:
- Self-Regulation. Take time to think before you act, and manage your emotions prior to reacting to negative situations.
- Growth Mindset. Carol S. Dweck makes the case (which I summarize here) that excellence is not a set point but rather an act of becoming. Welcome challenges and setbacks as learning experiences and opportunities to improve and grow.
- Resilience. When you fail, don’t let it get to you — persevere, try something different, and keep trying. This is the “grit” made famous by Angela Duckworth in her TED Talk and book.
- Passion. Hidden in the research about the 10,000-hour rule to becoming exceptional is a graveyard of broken hearts. Many people lost the passion for their true calling after a few hundred hours of experience. A mean coach, strict parents, performance-contingent rewards, and a long list of deal-breakers can suck the life out of anyone’s potential. It’s the passion that nets the hours, and the hours cause the talent. Guard your passions like a precious gem.
- Empathy. The ability to feel the feelings of your clients and colleagues allows you to work with them on things that are important to them. Empathy develops that closeness and warmth at the root of great relationships. Empathy is a key ingredient in Brené Brown’s research on vulnerability and shame. It’s critical to feel the feelings of others in order to help them with those things that bother them the most.
- Conscientiousness. These people are disciplined, compliant, and plan ahead. Salt-of-the-earth people get things done, allowing others to rely on them, building trust and teamwork. In my experience, you can be conscientious but not be recognized, so you may need some other behavior to turn this quality into gold, such as boasting or billing.
- Openness to Experience. More to the point, curiosity. Curious people are four times as likely to succeed in class. Curiosity is a mixture of several other attributes above, but does deserve its own word. It’s easiest to understand why curiosity is important when you look at it in reverse and imagine those who are uncurious. Admit it, you want them to fail.
- Social Skills. This is a sincere other-orientation where you can, according to the leadernomics.com article, “network, function in a team and bring people together…” At this point we’re getting into a magic-jelly attribute that’s really just dozens of mini-skills pulled together by experience.
You may recognize self-regulation, empathy, and social skills as the key elements of emotional intelligence, as described by Dan Goleman in his book by the same name. Goleman makes the case that our wellbeing and social advancement is strongly influenced by an emotionally-awakened ability to pull together meaningful relationships and interactions. The evidence is strong that mutual understanding at an emotional level is critical to having a good life. Relationships are important, and you cannot finesse relationships with logic alone.
The evidence is strong that mutual understanding at an emotional level is critical to having a good life. Relationships are important, and you cannot finesse relationships with logic alone.
Can Low IQ Undermine Other Types of Intelligence?
But sometimes IQ is still critical to success. A few years ago, I watched an event at the Special Olympics which my workplace was hosting. I was doing Olympic lifts as part of my fitness routine, and I was curious to see what the activity looked like for those with an intellectual disability. Lifting can be a brain game. Any lack of focus and concentration can cause failure. You need to calculate the correct weight, approach the bar as if it’s the only thing in your world, and put all of your focus into one thing: lift this weight. If your thoughts under-perform,they can cause the body to under-perform.
One contestant at the Special Olympics was a large fellow who was the previous year’s champion. He made two really impressive lifts at a high weight, the last of which was obviously near his maximum (the beet-red face is the give-away). He only needed to make one last lift that was equal to his previous one, and he would become champion once again. But instead, he asked to have an additional twenty pounds put onto the bar. He pulled and pulled but the bar wouldn’t budge. He didn’t place because he had not made three successful lifts.
I thought to myself, did his intellectual disability affect his athletic performance? Was it entirely up to him to choose to add twenty pounds? What was his emotional state when he made this decision? Was he over-confident? Did he perceive that today was going to be his best day ever? I also wonder if he learned from this experience, and whether he would persevere and came back with a vengeance next year.
Are There MultipleTypes of Intelligence?
Watching this athlete attempt his third lift was intriguing to me because of the disparities in his talents. There’s a debate about whether there is more than one type of intelligence. Howard Gardner is the author of several articles and a book on the topic. Gardner proposes the theory that there are in eight different intellectual ‘modalities.’ The first three items – visual-spatial, linguistic-verbal, and logical mathematical – resemble those abilities tested in IQ tests. Two others – interpersonal and intrapersonal – once again match the emotional intelligence indicators described by Goleman. Then there are the two modalities where it’s possible to become a world-famous star in sport or music – bodily-kinesthetic and musical-rhythmic.
But Gardner’s theory starts to falls apart when he gets to naturalistic intelligence because he names a specific subject-area, which is biology. Why biology but not other disciplines? This puzzle brings into question whether a specific interest in nature or music or math are just the canvas onto which intelligence is applied. Indeed, Gardner starts with seven intelligences, but then adds existential, moral, and naturalistic intelligences. At this point, we’re on a slippery slope to the full list in the Clifton strengths assessment, which itself has stronger empirical basis and a broad public appeal.
One Intelligence toRule Them All
Can someone with a really strong IQ just become good at the non-logic intelligences? There is some evidence that this is the case, when we look into something called the “g factor.” The g factor is the notion that there is a core type of general intelligence (g = general). According to the evidence, this intelligence passes-through into the sub-variants of other types of intelligence. When studies extract this g factor from several batteries of tests, the varied g-factor measurements are extremely similar regardless of the type of test. And, there’s always a positive relationship between someone’s g factor and their measures of other intelligence types, ranging from 10-90% with an average “g load” of 60%.
But there’s heated debate about whether there is an underlying single type of intelligence, probably because of a touchy social critique. The g factor implies that people have a fate and are destined for a set path in life, like Oedipus or Macbeth. This is disturbing, it feels unfair, and if it were true, a lot of people would wish it weren’t so. By contrast, the multiple intelligences theory brings to mind the legend of stone soup in which a visitor comes to town and places a stone in a giant pot. He asks for help, and everyone in the village throws in their own special ingredient, a metaphor for diversity in talents. The village boils up the soup, it’s delicious, and everyone gets to eat. Society rocks!
I love the stone soup story, but to clarify, it’s about exceptional sociology. A clever visitor manages to get a great meal for free. The visitor is a leader, has a collective orientation, and he is strong on Gardner’s interpersonal intelligence. However, we could also interpret that the visitor also has a strong g-score. On one hand, we don’t want geniuses to hoard all the money and power, but on the other hand, we want to harness genius such that it contributes to collective wellbeing. I think the research about intelligence and the way we discuss it in the public sphere is strongly influenced by these kinds of social and political forces. Notwithstanding the evidence, we’re entitled to influence these social forces as citizens.
We don’t need to reject the notion that brain power drives positive results. We need the context, the wisdom, and the agency to organize ourselves such that society moves forward, together. And we’re going to need that big guy to get the rock into the pot.
Stuart Murray Speaks 