In my own life, I see more and more "evidence" that IQ, or academic achievement, is the wrong metric for intelligence. When I grew up, everyone was telling me t

In my own life, I see more and more "evidence" that IQ, or academic achievement, is the wrong metric for intelligence. When I grew up, everyone was telling me that intelligence is in direct relation with how you perform at school. Someone who performs well at school is by definition intelligent, someone who is not good at school is not intelligent. Simple. This went on after high school. Here in Belgium, the better students go to university while the less achieving students go to something directly translated to English as "high school". A "high school" in Belgium is a more applied type of study. For instance, you won't see any theoretical computer science course (decidability, complexity theory) taught at a "high school". Again, it was assumed that universities produce the intelligent people and "high school" the less intelligent people. During the past few months, being part of a startup, I've worked with several people who in my eyes are intelligent. These guys can come up with creative solutions to problems, well into the realm of out-of-the-box thinking. However, they don't all come from universities. Some have a "high school" degree, or no degree at all. It made me realise that academic achievement is not a good measure for creativity. While for me, creativity is an important factor in intelligence. Many fellow students in my university computer science course were "intelligent" by academic achievement (after all they were able to finish an engineering university degree) but I wouldn't call them intelligent, just because they lacked this creativity. They were good when they were being told what to do but had a hard time thinking out-of-the-box. And I think that creativity is so important in the definition of intelligence. I'm not saying that intelligence is all about creativity. Someone who can think creatively and think analytically is more intelligent than someone who is just good at thinking creatively. But I'm saying that academic achievement (typically related to IQ) is not a good measure for intelligence because it lacks that "creativity" factor. "Ken Robinson says school kills creativity" is a great TED talk about this (http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...).