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Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)

212 points by SworDsy 12y ago

ducthinhdt 12y ago
Good article.
DiabloD3 12y ago
As someone with a high IQ, I can't help but agree with this in its entirety. For those who thought this was too long, I can summarize it as thus: "Don't overthink things, and refine your brain power. An unrefined brain is a useless tool, no matter how smart you are."
adamzerner 12y ago
1. It would have been helpful to be more specific about what is meant by "intelligence". I get the sense that it is referring to knowledge and/or aptitude. 2. I think the message is, "Intelligence isn't enough. You also need perseverance to succeed." I don't know if the implication is if those two conditions are necessary, or that they're sufficient, but it sort of felt like it was saying that they're sufficient. The examples seem like they were making the point that, once you add perseverance on to the intelligence, you get success. Anyway, success is obviously more complicated than "intelligence" + perseverance. I'm sure the author knows this, but the article seemed to oversimplify things, and didn't try to really break success into its components.
- alexeisadeski3 12y ago
  1. IQ 2. Think he meant necessary.
korzun 12y ago
Plenty of people are not 'intelligent' and have no motivation. Dinner with 'vice president at one of the top 5 consulting companies in the world'. That sounds like something out of: "Intelligent?!?! Read TOP 10 things that you are doing wrong right now!"
paulhauggis 12y ago
I'm s glad to see an article like this on HN, as opposed to articles that attribute success to massive amounts of luck.
- girvo 12y ago
  As far as I've experienced, both are required.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    My dad has a version of this story. He was born in a village in Bangladesh and while he's not a VP at a "top 5" consulting company, he raised us upper middle class in an expensive DC suburb. He notes he was smart, but never the smartest person; hard working, but not the hardest working person; in addition to both, he was also very lucky. There's an additional dimension too. Ambition and extroversion I guess. The smartest, hardest working people I know from undergrad are engineering PhD's toiling away on the tenure track. Failure according to the author.
NotVerySmart 12y ago
To sound intentionally arrogant and possibly ignorant, this whole write-up is captain-obvious material.
- goldenkey 12y ago
  It may be obvious but not worthless to write about.
- hellodevnull 12y ago
  Yes I thought everybody knew by now that intelligence is pretty much insignificant when you're up against somebody with years of experience at something. There was even a very popular pop psych book about it that everyone has read (Outliers). Your high IQ might get you good grades in elementary but gaining skill (which is what you're all talking about) is done through practice.
  - rimantas 12y ago
    but there is also this: http://www.spring.org.uk/2014/07/the-10000-hours-myth-practice-predicts-only-12-of-performance.php http://www.spring.org.uk/2014/07/the-10000-hours-myth-practi...
fizz_ed 12y ago
This reminds me a bit of a steve yegge quote. "Having a good memory is a serious impediment to understanding. It lets you cheat your way through life." This also reminds me quite a bit of the famous conversation between Eric S. Raymond and Linus Torvalds about "the curse of the gifted."
ammon 12y ago
Choosing to fight a man with a knife who is trying to rob you is stupid and dangerous, regardless of your training. I'm not sure what this says about the thesis.
- goldenkey 12y ago
  If anything, I think the article serves to boast on the author's intelligence. And we all know what it means when a man talks about his penis size..
- ilaksh 12y ago
  I think it suggests that a big part of success is luck. He was lucky that man didn't really know how to use the knife or intend to kill him with it. Anyway forget the mugging analogy because it is a stretch and distracts from useful information. First, people aren't so much smarter than others than they think. People who persevere are more likely to be "lucky", since they keep trying until they are "lucky". Another huge aspect of this is self-identity. If you think you are supposed to be a consulting VP, then you can be. Most people don't think that. Another huge aspect of success is advantage. This can be in the form of a social network or just having a slightly well-off uncle to give a loan at an important time. Or it can just be physical health. When it comes down to it, circumstances play a larger role than I think most people in our current structure want to believe. This is not a machine that rewards merit. There is also a strange focus on the individual in this mindset. But I go back to the belief that innate intelligence differences between humans are generally not nearly as great as we think they are. I also think that often circumstantial difficulties can be overcome, if there is enough perseverance. So I think one of the most important factors may be identity. In other words, who do you think you are?
  - vinceguidry 12y ago
    If someone is mugging you with a knife, guaranteed he never took the time or the expense to learn how to properly use his weapon. Or he wouldn't have any need to mug someone.
funkyy 12y ago
I like how some people do this IQ tests and brag how smart they are. The intelligence do not come from how you solve a test, or what degree you got. The intelligence is art of using a brain in a smart way in my opinion. Your tool is your brain. You can put it in to the rest, you can let it do the job, or you can actually test drive it and push it as hard as you can.
randallsquared 12y ago
I don't think the knife analogy is a great one. High IQ is more like having a ladder, in a world of cliffs. Someone can train themselves to jump higher than a ladder which is relatively short, but a ladder of two or three standard deviations is no longer in that range. If you have a tall ladder, try to focus your efforts higher.
- andrewflnr 12y ago
  I guess that works, but then the point of the article is that someone who doesn't have a ladder but trains to climb the cliff face will eventually beat someone who only knows how to use their ladder.
  - mtdewcmu 12y ago
    The point had to do with knives, not ladders. If you have a knife and you're well-trained in knife skills, and your adversaries are all armed only with ladders, you are easily going to win that fight. I think that's the point he was trying to make.
    - phlo 12y ago
      The point was to emphasize how ladders are clearly superior to knives, or even sticks. As has been demonstrated in literature[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrRFzwPE0d4&t=3m13s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrRFzwPE0d4&t=3m13s
      - mtdewcmu 12y ago
        Jackie Chan is the obvious and only exception to the rule. He could kick anyone's ass with a ladder.
fr0ggerrr 12y ago
Reminds me of the military.
coryl 12y ago
I can't help but have heard this story before, perhaps by an HN user in another thread in the past. Didn't the Ofer fellow end up dieing in a robbery further down the line?
deleted 12y ago
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underwater 12y ago
I take issue with the assumption that you're not a success unless you're a VP at a consulting firm. In particularly the assertion that the other engineers in the story -- who for all we know may have preferred to remain in their roles -- have suffered some terrible fate that we need to be warned against.
- sergiotapia 12y ago
  It's funny because my dad's idea of success is owning a company and making a lot of money. I have different goals. I'd rather earn 80 a year and work 9-to-5 than slave away at work.
  - jordanthoms 12y ago
    Or own a company / work harder and save the additional cash, then retire at 40?
    - sergiotapia 12y ago
      Yep and your kids are teenagers and you missed their entire childhood because you were at the office. No thanks brah.
      - judk 12y ago
        Are teenagers such terrible people? After the 350 diaper, the deep emotional rewards start to have diminishing marginal utility. Work/Life balance is possible.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - galfarragem 12y ago
    I walked both paths already. From a distance I realize that I was never so happy than with a 9-to-5 and having time to live in the present. Minor chances of being successful in the future with a 9-to-8(+) seem a terrible deal. I wish I could forget ambition. DEVIL: "20 years in jail and then I will give you X millions!" YOU:_
vomitcuddle 12y ago
Not everyone has a "I just moved to a foreign country and have to make a living somehow" moment. Any specific advice for a person who found school easy and now has problems challenging themselves further in live?
- nmrm 12y ago
  Move to a foreign country without much cash for a summer or so. Hopefully your employer is accommodating; if not, find a good story or line-up a new job. It's an incredibly liberating experience. Puts a lot into perspective.
conroe64 12y ago
IMHO, to continually put "success" above everything else in your life and slave away towards that goal as the ultimate redemption in everything is a waste of your time and therefore your life. It can be such as easy sell, especially to people with low self-esteem... if only you were rich, had a great body, had success with the opposite sex, etc., etc. And always underlying it, but never spoken of, is the vain and self centered attempt to compare yourself to others and come out on top. When these goals are achieved, rarely does anyone publicly say that it wasn't worth it. It's like a bad marriage rotting from the inside. No one wants to admit to being a fool. So stuff like this propagate, it's a beautiful lie. Rather than think of how awesome your life will be if you just work a little harder and achieve success, you might as well be talking about how great heaven will be as long as you follow some arbitrary religious text. It's like you think someone out there is keeping score, and it's all some type of game which you can win. We came from nature, and in nature, nobody keeps score. Animals live and die on the basis of stupid luck all the time. On your death bed you probably won't be looking over your life and decide whether it was worthwhile or not, and give yourself some report card on it. Instead you more likely won't even remember more than bits and pieces, and then eventually die and forget it all. The hero in the story is an Israeli soldier who decided to risk his life over a few dollars in his pocket. To do what, prove he was macho? He was really stupid in my book. And we're supposed to, according to the author, look up to this man? Train all our lives as a knife fighter, so we, too, can take dumb risks and be lucky enough to not get killed doing so? What if it went the other way, and the soldier friend was hurt or killed? Would the author still be putting him on a pedestal as he does so? I'm not saying don't try. Just make sure you are enjoying what you are doing, first and foremost. If you're not happy, either motivate yourself in a positive way, or let it go. It really isn't worth it.
- marcosscriven 12y ago
  Couldn't have said it better myself.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
crimsonalucard 12y ago
This article is more about perseverance and hard work then it is about intelligence.
crimsonalucard 12y ago
With odds at one in 176 million the only people who succeed in winning the lottery are those stupid enough to try.
michaelochurch 12y ago
At first (before I RTFA) I was going to come here to disagree vehemently. There are severe founder-quality issues right now and a lot of that has to do with low-IQ people who failed out of banking or management consulting getting funded, while actually smart people with less social polish get fuck-all. 140+ IQ doesn't mean much, but I'd fund a 140+ over a well-connected douchebag any day of the year. The problem is that so many not-smart people (Spiegel, Duplan) are getting funded and it's generating such a slew of crap companies that the rising generation (Millennials) may have lost the knowledge necessary to build good ones. Then I RTFA and found that I agree, wholeheartedly. The metaphor he gives is of an overconfident assailant who has a knife, but is untrained and is beaten by a bare-handed opponent. Correctly, we assess our enemies in office politics as being stupider. That VP/NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who-The-Fuck-Knows) doesn't know what a monad is. He probably couldn't write a for-loop to save his own dick. Those bikeshedding "big picture guys" who "do product" aren't intellectually sophisticated people. All that said, they continue to beat the piss out of us in the game of office politics. They do nothing but, somehow, get paid twice as much and get to make a lot of decisions that we ought to be making. As a group, we have to stop fucking moping, figure out why, and change it. Too many software engineers are so self-congratulatory about their intellectual ability, and too easily swayed by bullshit perks, to realize that they're actually getting robbed blind by jerks in The Business who aren't nearly as smart (they don't have the knife) but who've been training at social machination and in dominating other people for as long as we've been studying computers. We have to stop thinking it's "dirty" or undignified or unprofessional to "get political" and figure out a way to get our due. We have to stop putting our heads in the sand and saying "I just want to code". We are a hard-working group (even the smart ones work really hard) but we need to accept that some of that hard work is going to have to involve learning CS 666 (software politics), as ugly as the skill may be, and playing to win, to fucking demolish our enemies instead of having them defeat us.
- mtdewcmu 12y ago
  That's an astute misreading of the article, but here's my take: the writer clearly must have been successful in his startup, otherwise he wouldn't feel qualified to speak on what counts for success in starting companies. Once you're successful, you have the best of all worlds: you can act as if you had no intellectual advantage, and had to get where you are solely through pluck and hard work. Then you can look down your nose at both groups: the intellectual guys with lousy jobs and the dim-witted stuffed shirts. No one will doubt that you are not both smarter than the geeks and better at decision-making than the decision guys, because the fact remains, you beat the odds and created a successful startup, and you're still rich. So, I think that's the lesson. You can be really smart, or really hard working, but odds are that you don't have your own company and you're not rich, so either way you don't know shit.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
One of the things a good University program does is take someone to past the limits of their natural intelligence. Running into the wall is one of the rites of passage of figuring out how to work. For me it was electromagnetic field theory, that crap kicked my butt! But getting through the class on additional study and work was pretty important for me.
- mtdewcmu 12y ago
  And, years later, slowly but surely, you've managed to rack up a breathtaking point-score in your HN karma account. That electromagnetic field theory work must have instilled you with tremendous karma. :)
hyp0 12y ago
aka the tortoise and the hare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare), or, for a more topical treatment determination beats intelligence (http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html, http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html) It's universal. e.g. I'm not supersmart, but maybe halfway between supersmart and average - enough to have glimpses; to know what I'm missing; that my reach exceeds my grasp. I breezed though school, undergrad, honours, masters. The game was how little work I could do. But at PhD level I wanted to do world-class work, and so glimpsed ideas I couldn't effortlessly "just grasp". I kept trying to "just grasp" them in different ways... Now, finally, I'm attempting to build up my skills, one higher-level at a time. It's ughhh because it makes me feel really stupid... but that's just because I am. At least, relative to the task. I'm making progress. So I've got that going for me, which is nice. The common wisdom is that less intelligent people hit this barrier earlier, and (if they want to) learn the skills to overcome it when younger. They are net better off.
- Karellen 12y ago
  Also, The Curse of the Gifted http://lwn.net/2000/0824/a/esr-sharing.php3 http://lwn.net/2000/0824/a/esr-sharing.php3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221756
TeMPOraL 12y ago
I took an important lesson from that article, completely unrelated to startups, when first reading it few years ago. > The man with the knife did not know how to use that knife. If he had been as trained in knife fighting as I was in hand combat, he would have been able to destroy me. But he had a tool that he felt gave him an advantage (...) You can have a false sense of confidence that because you possess a particular tool, you're safe, even though you have no idea how to use it. If the first time you discover how the tool works is in a dangerous situation, you'd likely be much better of if you didn't have that tool in the first place. I applied this lesson many times in my life. For example, after a theoretical worplace safety course at my job I realized I have no clue how fire extinguishers actually work, so I bought one and fired it outside in an area where it wouldn't disturb anybody. And now I know how extinguishers behave and what to expect from them. Another time, a friend of mine was planning to buy pepper spray, because she was often returning late at night from university. I told her to buy two cans, because just having a spray will instill a false sense of confidence in her. We used up the second spray for "training", for her to see how it actually works, so that in case of real danger, she wouldn't have to worry about how to use the gas and how it actually works.
- mtdewcmu 12y ago
  That reminds me of this slightly crazy guy I knew in college and roomed with senior year. He had been an RA, and "somehow," during some meeting, he managed to discharge part of a pepper spray canister, which led to the meeting having to be evacuated. I think it must have been accidental, precipitated -- obviously -- by playing with it at an utterly inappropriate time. I don't take any life lesson from the article, which was vaguely glib and self-satisfied. Life is never fair; sometimes you have the knife and don't know how to use it; sometimes you work hard and lose the fight for not having a knife. What you want is to have both the knife, the right preparation, and the right opportunity to use it all at the same time. How do you go about setting all that up?
  - judk 12y ago
    Success is predicated on serendipity. Chance favors the prepared mind. Be prepared. Make your own luck. We can't control what happens to us, but we can try to make the best of what comes instead of falling to the worst.
b1daly 12y ago
Hey, since no one else is bringing up the "citation please" criticism of the post, I will. Sorry, but it's just a dumb thesis, asserted in utter confidence. The evidence to support it would be something along the lines of an inverse relationship between a measurable aspect of intelligence and a measurable aspect of startup or other life failure. Intuitively, I highly doubt such a relationship exists. Otherwise, the article is basically making the observation that being "successful" in business is generally hard. But it's the internet, you can say whatever you want!
freechoice22 12y ago
Good article and reminder of how it is. To learn from our failures and hardships is where we grow the most. IQ is only few percent of the total intelligence. But most people seem to see it as 99% so often. It also comes down to so many other factors such as the environment we are brought up in, which affects our intelligence. Intelligence is not some blueprint we have from birth I learned. But very much our mental outlook on life as we progress. Those who feel intelligent due to high IQ makes me wonder how intelligent they truly are. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fundamentally-flawed-and-using-them-alone-to-measure-intelligence-is-a-fallacy-study-finds-8425911.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-funda...
PeterGriffin 12y ago
The point the article makes is well understood and valid: even if you have the potential, if you don't work hard to use it, you won't develop the skills and discipline for success. All right. But we don't need to cast failures and flaws as the result of "high intelligence". Just a few days ago we had an article about the "curse of smart people". It feels like a bunch of people patting themselves on the back and telling themselves "oh, we're so intelligent, this is why we failed". If intelligent people are so prone to failure, what is the purpose of measuring intelligence? Being stupid is bad, being average is bad, now being smart is also bad! Congratulations. Part of the problem is the ease at which we proclaim ourselves "very intelligent". Being good at school is not a sure sign of high intelligence - school is an artificial environment that values short-term memorizing of facts, over critical analysis and independent decision-making. You won't go far in life with that, but maybe you'll do well in quiz TV shows. Solving "missing piece" puzzles also isn't a sign of high intelligence. All those are just a small part of it. Can't we agree "intelligent" is the skill of setting good goals, achieving them, and making good decisions in light of limited facts, limited time, and some stress, because that's what life is, and move on to strive (and possibly measure) for that.
- rikibro 12y ago
  I concur. Great post. About the "curse of smart people", which also applies to those who are better at sports, or something else, one cannot forget the Rocky 3 effect - sometimes, external circumstances will allow you took relax and stop progressing in your skills (and thus, not much effort) while still being successful. When a big problem/challenge arises, it will "hurt" more to leave the comfort zone, and then it depends on oneself...
- metacorrector 12y ago
  Can't we agree? with redefining what intelligent means on the basis of your reasonably well written discussion post? NO, we can't agree on that at all. Your post is thoughtful and well meaning, but intelligence means... well I'm not an expert at defining it (I know my limitations, learn from me), but the people who are experts at it have devised tests for measuring it, and it's extremely well documented, and measurable, and if you have it you score high on IQ tests, and if you don't you don't. I have it. It's been measured. And I know it when I see it in other people, and always have, even before it was measured. If we sat down to play a new board game that neither of us had seen before, I'd most likely learn it quicker and start kicking your ass sooner. Does that guarantee success in my life? no. Does it give me some potential? yes. For some of reasons that you give. You wrote a good post. Just don't try to redefine the word intelligence just so it can be a compliment paid to a different set of people. And while we are at it, can we stop saying that people are beautiful on the inside? "Beauty is only skin deep" is an expression because that's what the word means. Yes, I'm aware that it is in the nature of language that words evolve and humans like extending the meanings of words and making analogies and metaphors, and that it can have perfectly understandable meaning to say that people with "emotional intelligence are beautiful on the inside", but that doesn't redefine the words nor rename the concepts. /rant
nadam 12y ago
This is true, but precisely because it is true, at the top of every game everybody is reasonably hard working. And among these hard-working people other factors start to decide again, and a very important factor is talent. So if you compare yourself to the guy who watches TV all day, of course hard work is the main thing. But if you compare yourself to fellow enterpreneurs, Phd studentst, hackers with great github repositories, or guys who work long hours at their workplace to advance, who maybe does not watch TV at all, talent matters.
- judk 12y ago
  At some point, you hit a region where access to capital and powerful friends is the difference, not talent. For example, Larry Page and Zuck had wealthy investors and access to enployees who were more talented than themselves but accepted a lower share in the conpanies they built.
junto 12y ago
I have a nice counter example to this. I've travelled extensively in South and Central America. I met a guy who had been robbed twice in Rio, one week apart, by the same guy, at the same time in the evening, in the same place. I also had the feeling though that some people are just magnets for trouble. Personally, I always travelled with two wallets. One real one stashed in belt and the other with 10 USD in it. People will walk away 99℅ of the time with the $10.
keithpeter 12y ago
The bit about clever people who have always found it easy to achieve rings true when you are working with training teachers. They have problems with the teaching sometimes. These problems are not easy, scalar or well defined. There are no 'textbook' solutions. Some cope with the messy reality well and some don't.
gaelow 12y ago
What high IQ?
denysonique 12y ago
"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
- judk 12y ago
  His reminds me of the horse in _Animal Farm_. His mantra was "I will work harder" , and he worked himself to death in support of the crafty manipulative pigs.
bocalogic 12y ago
Years ago I was traveling to Oakland for business. My flight was delayed so I hit the magazine store. Bought some gaming magazines, business magazines and one copy of Havard Business Review. There was an article in it that caught my eye, "Why do dumb people succeed more in business than smart people." I dont remember exactly the title but it was an 8 to 10 page article that went into detail comparing high IQ people to average or low IQ people and why people with lower average IQ did better in business. The article was filled with graphs and case studies and was very interesting. But the last paragraph really summarized it best, "Smart people consistently over analyzed risk and talked themselves out of taking risks while someone with a lower IQ didnt even think about the risk and jumped in with both feet and took chances." It gets back to the saying "No risk / No reward". I remember that article to this day and always do a gut check when it comes to evaluating new risks. Sometimes I second voice my old European grandfather who was all about hard work in a different industry but his life lessons hold true. Turning off the brain chatter and clearly evaluating a situation is critical but it s very hard because intelligent people, and humans in general, like to avoid risk and the temporary unpleasant pain that accompanies it.
- agent00f 12y ago
  I wonder if such studies are susceptible to bad stats of confirmation bias as many business studies are. What I mean is whether they had proper controls to assess whether each average person is more likely to succeed than each "smart" person given the same scenario. If they instead took a bunch of successful people, figured out that a lot of them weren't that "smart", then it could be the product of there being a lot more average than smart folk. In other words, "smart" doesn't guarantee business success such that all successful businesspeople are IQ gods, but we all knew that.
mtdewcmu 12y ago
The more I think about this and reread it, the more smug and self-serving it sounds, and the more difficult it becomes to believe that this manages to pass for a gem of wisdom and sage advice. It is nothing but a negative stereotype of people with high IQs as being essentially lazy and entitled. What motive is there to stereotype people with high intelligence? It sounds like sour grapes. Couldn't it be true, though? The history of similar stereotypes isn't good; lazy and entitled is one of the all-time most popular stereotypes of any despised out-group, and I suspect it hasn't been the go-to slander because it has a superior likelihood of turning out to be true and defensible. Here's a one-word rebuttal: doctors. We adopt stereotyped beliefs simply because of how they make us feel. Ordinarily, intelligent people would seem to make a poor target, because it's a group that, by definition, is distinguished by superiority, having as its sole determinant a very high IQ. It's not so easy to identify who around you might be in this group, and to attack it, you would seem to have to admit being less intelligent. The built-in requirement to demean your own intelligence along the way could almost just poison any possible benefit of stereotyping. But -- I'm not familiar with the name Max Klein, and it's such a combination of common names that it's almost ideal for being impervious to Google. From context and clues, though, I gather that this person must have achieved some amount of fame due to some startup-related achievement. I speculated in another comment that if anything could confer a license to feel superior to practically anyone, it would be having a successful startup. Who wouldn't want one, and by virtue of having it, in a way you are smarter than PhDs and Nobel Prize winners. The source largely makes no difference, though. You can judge a piece of writing completely on its own merits. This particular piece of writing falls apart under closer examination.
- dwaltrip 12y ago
  You are over analyzing this. The author isn't deriding those with intelligence, he simply said it can sometimes provide a false sense of assurance. He also implied that in a start up, hard work matters more than raw intelligence, but intelligence can provide some advantage.
  - mtdewcmu 12y ago
    I'm not sure if I'm reading too much in, or if most people miss what it actually said and mentally insert platitudes. Even if it hedges all of its statements at some point and ends on a perfectly nonoffensive note, it still seems like a mediocre essay, because then it has absolutely nothing to say and uses a lot of words to say nothing. "Your IQ will kill your Startup" sounds like bold language to me. At the very least, there are overtones of anti-intellectualism. I don't see why HN is receptive to that.
graycat 12y ago
The title of this post > Your high IQ will kill your startup is too strong to be correct: The claim of "will kill" is claiming too much; 'might kill' is closer to being correct. In more detail, the OP essentially assumes that an intelligent person will try to 'coast' or 'relax' and depend just on their intelligence instead of working hard, learning more that is important, and doing the actual work needed for success. This assumption need not be correct in all cases, and my experience indicates that it is significantly wrong. Why? The OP mentions early school where intelligent people do well easily. Well, then, commonly they also get motivated to continue on in school. By the time they get to some junior/senior level courses in their major, to courses in graduate school, to the published peer-reviewed papers as background for their research, and to their Ph.D, research, they necessarily will have plenty of opportunities to encounter material where they have to work their little fingers, toes, and tails off. E.g., in computer science, if really intelligent, then jump all the way to tenured full professor in one stroke, just settle the question P versus NP. So far apparently no one has been intelligent enough to solve that problem. I've seen plenty of really intelligent people work their fingers, toes, and tails off in graduate school. Net, there are plenty of challenges in graduate school strong enough for the most intelligent people to have to work their fingers, toes, and tails off with levels of hard work that would compare with hard work from anyone from a galley slave, a dirt farmer, etc. Often, including in parts of school, intelligence alone is not enough, and plenty of intelligent people are smart enough to see this point. And, in cases of work challenges, since their pride from their intelligence is being tested, usually in a sense that is at least semi-public and, thus, visible to others from whom the person wants respect, they are motivated to do the real work needed for success. While the OP is claiming too much, it is possible for intelligent people to fail and for various reasons quite different from what the OP explained.
- dang 12y ago
  > The claim of "will kill" is claiming too much; 'might kill' is closer to being correct You're right, and we applied your edit. That was a bit of linkbait that snuck through. So is "your" in the title, for that matter, but we'll leave that.

212 points by SworDsy 12y ago

Good article.

As someone with a high IQ, I can't help but agree with this in its entirety. For those who thought this was too long, I can summarize it as thus: "Don't overthink things, and refine your brain power. An unrefined brain is a useless tool, no matter how smart you are."

adamzerner 12y ago

1. It would have been helpful to be more specific about what is meant by "intelligence". I get the sense that it is referring to knowledge and/or aptitude. 2. I think the message is, "Intelligence isn't enough. You also need perseverance to succeed." I don't know if the implication is if those two conditions are necessary, or that they're sufficient, but it sort of felt like it was saying that they're sufficient. The examples seem like they were making the point that, once you add perseverance on to the intelligence, you get success. Anyway, success is obviously more complicated than "intelligence" + perseverance. I'm sure the author knows this, but the article seemed to oversimplify things, and didn't try to really break success into its components.

alexeisadeski3 12y ago
1. IQ 2. Think he meant necessary.

korzun 12y ago

Plenty of people are not 'intelligent' and have no motivation. Dinner with 'vice president at one of the top 5 consulting companies in the world'. That sounds like something out of: "Intelligent?!?! Read TOP 10 things that you are doing wrong right now!"

paulhauggis 12y ago

I'm s glad to see an article like this on HN, as opposed to articles that attribute success to massive amounts of luck.

girvo 12y ago
As far as I've experienced, both are required.
- rayiner 12y ago
  My dad has a version of this story. He was born in a village in Bangladesh and while he's not a VP at a "top 5" consulting company, he raised us upper middle class in an expensive DC suburb. He notes he was smart, but never the smartest person; hard working, but not the hardest working person; in addition to both, he was also very lucky. There's an additional dimension too. Ambition and extroversion I guess. The smartest, hardest working people I know from undergrad are engineering PhD's toiling away on the tenure track. Failure according to the author.

NotVerySmart 12y ago

To sound intentionally arrogant and possibly ignorant, this whole write-up is captain-obvious material.

goldenkey 12y ago
It may be obvious but not worthless to write about.
hellodevnull 12y ago
Yes I thought everybody knew by now that intelligence is pretty much insignificant when you're up against somebody with years of experience at something. There was even a very popular pop psych book about it that everyone has read (Outliers). Your high IQ might get you good grades in elementary but gaining skill (which is what you're all talking about) is done through practice.
- rimantas 12y ago
  but there is also this: http://www.spring.org.uk/2014/07/the-10000-hours-myth-practice-predicts-only-12-of-performance.php http://www.spring.org.uk/2014/07/the-10000-hours-myth-practi...

fizz_ed 12y ago

This reminds me a bit of a steve yegge quote. "Having a good memory is a serious impediment to understanding. It lets you cheat your way through life." This also reminds me quite a bit of the famous conversation between Eric S. Raymond and Linus Torvalds about "the curse of the gifted."

ammon 12y ago

Choosing to fight a man with a knife who is trying to rob you is stupid and dangerous, regardless of your training. I'm not sure what this says about the thesis.

goldenkey 12y ago
If anything, I think the article serves to boast on the author's intelligence. And we all know what it means when a man talks about his penis size..
ilaksh 12y ago
I think it suggests that a big part of success is luck. He was lucky that man didn't really know how to use the knife or intend to kill him with it. Anyway forget the mugging analogy because it is a stretch and distracts from useful information. First, people aren't so much smarter than others than they think. People who persevere are more likely to be "lucky", since they keep trying until they are "lucky". Another huge aspect of this is self-identity. If you think you are supposed to be a consulting VP, then you can be. Most people don't think that. Another huge aspect of success is advantage. This can be in the form of a social network or just having a slightly well-off uncle to give a loan at an important time. Or it can just be physical health. When it comes down to it, circumstances play a larger role than I think most people in our current structure want to believe. This is not a machine that rewards merit. There is also a strange focus on the individual in this mindset. But I go back to the belief that innate intelligence differences between humans are generally not nearly as great as we think they are. I also think that often circumstantial difficulties can be overcome, if there is enough perseverance. So I think one of the most important factors may be identity. In other words, who do you think you are?
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  If someone is mugging you with a knife, guaranteed he never took the time or the expense to learn how to properly use his weapon. Or he wouldn't have any need to mug someone.

funkyy 12y ago

I like how some people do this IQ tests and brag how smart they are. The intelligence do not come from how you solve a test, or what degree you got. The intelligence is art of using a brain in a smart way in my opinion. Your tool is your brain. You can put it in to the rest, you can let it do the job, or you can actually test drive it and push it as hard as you can.

randallsquared 12y ago

I don't think the knife analogy is a great one. High IQ is more like having a ladder, in a world of cliffs. Someone can train themselves to jump higher than a ladder which is relatively short, but a ladder of two or three standard deviations is no longer in that range. If you have a tall ladder, try to focus your efforts higher.

andrewflnr 12y ago
I guess that works, but then the point of the article is that someone who doesn't have a ladder but trains to climb the cliff face will eventually beat someone who only knows how to use their ladder.
- mtdewcmu 12y ago
  The point had to do with knives, not ladders. If you have a knife and you're well-trained in knife skills, and your adversaries are all armed only with ladders, you are easily going to win that fight. I think that's the point he was trying to make.
  - phlo 12y ago
    The point was to emphasize how ladders are clearly superior to knives, or even sticks. As has been demonstrated in literature[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrRFzwPE0d4&t=3m13s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrRFzwPE0d4&t=3m13s
    - mtdewcmu 12y ago
      Jackie Chan is the obvious and only exception to the rule. He could kick anyone's ass with a ladder.

fr0ggerrr 12y ago

Reminds me of the military.

coryl 12y ago

I can't help but have heard this story before, perhaps by an HN user in another thread in the past. Didn't the Ofer fellow end up dieing in a robbery further down the line?

deleted 12y ago

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underwater 12y ago

I take issue with the assumption that you're not a success unless you're a VP at a consulting firm. In particularly the assertion that the other engineers in the story -- who for all we know may have preferred to remain in their roles -- have suffered some terrible fate that we need to be warned against.

sergiotapia 12y ago
It's funny because my dad's idea of success is owning a company and making a lot of money. I have different goals. I'd rather earn 80 a year and work 9-to-5 than slave away at work.
- jordanthoms 12y ago
  Or own a company / work harder and save the additional cash, then retire at 40?
  - sergiotapia 12y ago
    Yep and your kids are teenagers and you missed their entire childhood because you were at the office. No thanks brah.
    - judk 12y ago
      Are teenagers such terrible people? After the 350 diaper, the deep emotional rewards start to have diminishing marginal utility. Work/Life balance is possible.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- galfarragem 12y ago
  I walked both paths already. From a distance I realize that I was never so happy than with a 9-to-5 and having time to live in the present. Minor chances of being successful in the future with a 9-to-8(+) seem a terrible deal. I wish I could forget ambition. DEVIL: "20 years in jail and then I will give you X millions!" YOU:_

vomitcuddle 12y ago

Not everyone has a "I just moved to a foreign country and have to make a living somehow" moment. Any specific advice for a person who found school easy and now has problems challenging themselves further in live?

nmrm 12y ago
Move to a foreign country without much cash for a summer or so. Hopefully your employer is accommodating; if not, find a good story or line-up a new job. It's an incredibly liberating experience. Puts a lot into perspective.

conroe64 12y ago

IMHO, to continually put "success" above everything else in your life and slave away towards that goal as the ultimate redemption in everything is a waste of your time and therefore your life. It can be such as easy sell, especially to people with low self-esteem... if only you were rich, had a great body, had success with the opposite sex, etc., etc. And always underlying it, but never spoken of, is the vain and self centered attempt to compare yourself to others and come out on top. When these goals are achieved, rarely does anyone publicly say that it wasn't worth it. It's like a bad marriage rotting from the inside. No one wants to admit to being a fool. So stuff like this propagate, it's a beautiful lie. Rather than think of how awesome your life will be if you just work a little harder and achieve success, you might as well be talking about how great heaven will be as long as you follow some arbitrary religious text. It's like you think someone out there is keeping score, and it's all some type of game which you can win. We came from nature, and in nature, nobody keeps score. Animals live and die on the basis of stupid luck all the time. On your death bed you probably won't be looking over your life and decide whether it was worthwhile or not, and give yourself some report card on it. Instead you more likely won't even remember more than bits and pieces, and then eventually die and forget it all. The hero in the story is an Israeli soldier who decided to risk his life over a few dollars in his pocket. To do what, prove he was macho? He was really stupid in my book. And we're supposed to, according to the author, look up to this man? Train all our lives as a knife fighter, so we, too, can take dumb risks and be lucky enough to not get killed doing so? What if it went the other way, and the soldier friend was hurt or killed? Would the author still be putting him on a pedestal as he does so? I'm not saying don't try. Just make sure you are enjoying what you are doing, first and foremost. If you're not happy, either motivate yourself in a positive way, or let it go. It really isn't worth it.

marcosscriven 12y ago
Couldn't have said it better myself.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

crimsonalucard 12y ago

This article is more about perseverance and hard work then it is about intelligence.

crimsonalucard 12y ago

With odds at one in 176 million the only people who succeed in winning the lottery are those stupid enough to try.

michaelochurch 12y ago

At first (before I RTFA) I was going to come here to disagree vehemently. There are severe founder-quality issues right now and a lot of that has to do with low-IQ people who failed out of banking or management consulting getting funded, while actually smart people with less social polish get fuck-all. 140+ IQ doesn't mean much, but I'd fund a 140+ over a well-connected douchebag any day of the year. The problem is that so many not-smart people (Spiegel, Duplan) are getting funded and it's generating such a slew of crap companies that the rising generation (Millennials) may have lost the knowledge necessary to build good ones. Then I RTFA and found that I agree, wholeheartedly. The metaphor he gives is of an overconfident assailant who has a knife, but is untrained and is beaten by a bare-handed opponent. Correctly, we assess our enemies in office politics as being stupider. That VP/NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who-The-Fuck-Knows) doesn't know what a monad is. He probably couldn't write a for-loop to save his own dick. Those bikeshedding "big picture guys" who "do product" aren't intellectually sophisticated people. All that said, they continue to beat the piss out of us in the game of office politics. They do nothing but, somehow, get paid twice as much and get to make a lot of decisions that we ought to be making. As a group, we have to stop fucking moping, figure out why, and change it. Too many software engineers are so self-congratulatory about their intellectual ability, and too easily swayed by bullshit perks, to realize that they're actually getting robbed blind by jerks in The Business who aren't nearly as smart (they don't have the knife) but who've been training at social machination and in dominating other people for as long as we've been studying computers. We have to stop thinking it's "dirty" or undignified or unprofessional to "get political" and figure out a way to get our due. We have to stop putting our heads in the sand and saying "I just want to code". We are a hard-working group (even the smart ones work really hard) but we need to accept that some of that hard work is going to have to involve learning CS 666 (software politics), as ugly as the skill may be, and playing to win, to fucking demolish our enemies instead of having them defeat us.

mtdewcmu 12y ago
That's an astute misreading of the article, but here's my take: the writer clearly must have been successful in his startup, otherwise he wouldn't feel qualified to speak on what counts for success in starting companies. Once you're successful, you have the best of all worlds: you can act as if you had no intellectual advantage, and had to get where you are solely through pluck and hard work. Then you can look down your nose at both groups: the intellectual guys with lousy jobs and the dim-witted stuffed shirts. No one will doubt that you are not both smarter than the geeks and better at decision-making than the decision guys, because the fact remains, you beat the odds and created a successful startup, and you're still rich. So, I think that's the lesson. You can be really smart, or really hard working, but odds are that you don't have your own company and you're not rich, so either way you don't know shit.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

One of the things a good University program does is take someone to past the limits of their natural intelligence. Running into the wall is one of the rites of passage of figuring out how to work. For me it was electromagnetic field theory, that crap kicked my butt! But getting through the class on additional study and work was pretty important for me.

mtdewcmu 12y ago
And, years later, slowly but surely, you've managed to rack up a breathtaking point-score in your HN karma account. That electromagnetic field theory work must have instilled you with tremendous karma. :)

hyp0 12y ago

aka the tortoise and the hare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare), or, for a more topical treatment determination beats intelligence (http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html, http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html) It's universal. e.g. I'm not supersmart, but maybe halfway between supersmart and average - enough to have glimpses; to know what I'm missing; that my reach exceeds my grasp. I breezed though school, undergrad, honours, masters. The game was how little work I could do. But at PhD level I wanted to do world-class work, and so glimpsed ideas I couldn't effortlessly "just grasp". I kept trying to "just grasp" them in different ways... Now, finally, I'm attempting to build up my skills, one higher-level at a time. It's ughhh because it makes me feel really stupid... but that's just because I am. At least, relative to the task. I'm making progress. So I've got that going for me, which is nice. The common wisdom is that less intelligent people hit this barrier earlier, and (if they want to) learn the skills to overcome it when younger. They are net better off.

Karellen 12y ago
Also, The Curse of the Gifted http://lwn.net/2000/0824/a/esr-sharing.php3 http://lwn.net/2000/0824/a/esr-sharing.php3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221756

TeMPOraL 12y ago

I took an important lesson from that article, completely unrelated to startups, when first reading it few years ago. > The man with the knife did not know how to use that knife. If he had been as trained in knife fighting as I was in hand combat, he would have been able to destroy me. But he had a tool that he felt gave him an advantage (...) You can have a false sense of confidence that because you possess a particular tool, you're safe, even though you have no idea how to use it. If the first time you discover how the tool works is in a dangerous situation, you'd likely be much better of if you didn't have that tool in the first place. I applied this lesson many times in my life. For example, after a theoretical worplace safety course at my job I realized I have no clue how fire extinguishers actually work, so I bought one and fired it outside in an area where it wouldn't disturb anybody. And now I know how extinguishers behave and what to expect from them. Another time, a friend of mine was planning to buy pepper spray, because she was often returning late at night from university. I told her to buy two cans, because just having a spray will instill a false sense of confidence in her. We used up the second spray for "training", for her to see how it actually works, so that in case of real danger, she wouldn't have to worry about how to use the gas and how it actually works.

mtdewcmu 12y ago
That reminds me of this slightly crazy guy I knew in college and roomed with senior year. He had been an RA, and "somehow," during some meeting, he managed to discharge part of a pepper spray canister, which led to the meeting having to be evacuated. I think it must have been accidental, precipitated -- obviously -- by playing with it at an utterly inappropriate time. I don't take any life lesson from the article, which was vaguely glib and self-satisfied. Life is never fair; sometimes you have the knife and don't know how to use it; sometimes you work hard and lose the fight for not having a knife. What you want is to have both the knife, the right preparation, and the right opportunity to use it all at the same time. How do you go about setting all that up?
- judk 12y ago
  Success is predicated on serendipity. Chance favors the prepared mind. Be prepared. Make your own luck. We can't control what happens to us, but we can try to make the best of what comes instead of falling to the worst.

b1daly 12y ago

Hey, since no one else is bringing up the "citation please" criticism of the post, I will. Sorry, but it's just a dumb thesis, asserted in utter confidence. The evidence to support it would be something along the lines of an inverse relationship between a measurable aspect of intelligence and a measurable aspect of startup or other life failure. Intuitively, I highly doubt such a relationship exists. Otherwise, the article is basically making the observation that being "successful" in business is generally hard. But it's the internet, you can say whatever you want!

freechoice22 12y ago

Good article and reminder of how it is. To learn from our failures and hardships is where we grow the most. IQ is only few percent of the total intelligence. But most people seem to see it as 99% so often. It also comes down to so many other factors such as the environment we are brought up in, which affects our intelligence. Intelligence is not some blueprint we have from birth I learned. But very much our mental outlook on life as we progress. Those who feel intelligent due to high IQ makes me wonder how intelligent they truly are. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fundamentally-flawed-and-using-them-alone-to-measure-intelligence-is-a-fallacy-study-finds-8425911.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-funda...

PeterGriffin 12y ago

The point the article makes is well understood and valid: even if you have the potential, if you don't work hard to use it, you won't develop the skills and discipline for success. All right. But we don't need to cast failures and flaws as the result of "high intelligence". Just a few days ago we had an article about the "curse of smart people". It feels like a bunch of people patting themselves on the back and telling themselves "oh, we're so intelligent, this is why we failed". If intelligent people are so prone to failure, what is the purpose of measuring intelligence? Being stupid is bad, being average is bad, now being smart is also bad! Congratulations. Part of the problem is the ease at which we proclaim ourselves "very intelligent". Being good at school is not a sure sign of high intelligence - school is an artificial environment that values short-term memorizing of facts, over critical analysis and independent decision-making. You won't go far in life with that, but maybe you'll do well in quiz TV shows. Solving "missing piece" puzzles also isn't a sign of high intelligence. All those are just a small part of it. Can't we agree "intelligent" is the skill of setting good goals, achieving them, and making good decisions in light of limited facts, limited time, and some stress, because that's what life is, and move on to strive (and possibly measure) for that.

rikibro 12y ago
I concur. Great post. About the "curse of smart people", which also applies to those who are better at sports, or something else, one cannot forget the Rocky 3 effect - sometimes, external circumstances will allow you took relax and stop progressing in your skills (and thus, not much effort) while still being successful. When a big problem/challenge arises, it will "hurt" more to leave the comfort zone, and then it depends on oneself...
metacorrector 12y ago
Can't we agree? with redefining what intelligent means on the basis of your reasonably well written discussion post? NO, we can't agree on that at all. Your post is thoughtful and well meaning, but intelligence means... well I'm not an expert at defining it (I know my limitations, learn from me), but the people who are experts at it have devised tests for measuring it, and it's extremely well documented, and measurable, and if you have it you score high on IQ tests, and if you don't you don't. I have it. It's been measured. And I know it when I see it in other people, and always have, even before it was measured. If we sat down to play a new board game that neither of us had seen before, I'd most likely learn it quicker and start kicking your ass sooner. Does that guarantee success in my life? no. Does it give me some potential? yes. For some of reasons that you give. You wrote a good post. Just don't try to redefine the word intelligence just so it can be a compliment paid to a different set of people. And while we are at it, can we stop saying that people are beautiful on the inside? "Beauty is only skin deep" is an expression because that's what the word means. Yes, I'm aware that it is in the nature of language that words evolve and humans like extending the meanings of words and making analogies and metaphors, and that it can have perfectly understandable meaning to say that people with "emotional intelligence are beautiful on the inside", but that doesn't redefine the words nor rename the concepts. /rant

nadam 12y ago

This is true, but precisely because it is true, at the top of every game everybody is reasonably hard working. And among these hard-working people other factors start to decide again, and a very important factor is talent. So if you compare yourself to the guy who watches TV all day, of course hard work is the main thing. But if you compare yourself to fellow enterpreneurs, Phd studentst, hackers with great github repositories, or guys who work long hours at their workplace to advance, who maybe does not watch TV at all, talent matters.

judk 12y ago
At some point, you hit a region where access to capital and powerful friends is the difference, not talent. For example, Larry Page and Zuck had wealthy investors and access to enployees who were more talented than themselves but accepted a lower share in the conpanies they built.

junto 12y ago

I have a nice counter example to this. I've travelled extensively in South and Central America. I met a guy who had been robbed twice in Rio, one week apart, by the same guy, at the same time in the evening, in the same place. I also had the feeling though that some people are just magnets for trouble. Personally, I always travelled with two wallets. One real one stashed in belt and the other with 10 USD in it. People will walk away 99℅ of the time with the $10.

keithpeter 12y ago

The bit about clever people who have always found it easy to achieve rings true when you are working with training teachers. They have problems with the teaching sometimes. These problems are not easy, scalar or well defined. There are no 'textbook' solutions. Some cope with the messy reality well and some don't.

gaelow 12y ago

What high IQ?

denysonique 12y ago

"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."

judk 12y ago
His reminds me of the horse in _Animal Farm_. His mantra was "I will work harder" , and he worked himself to death in support of the crafty manipulative pigs.

bocalogic 12y ago

Years ago I was traveling to Oakland for business. My flight was delayed so I hit the magazine store. Bought some gaming magazines, business magazines and one copy of Havard Business Review. There was an article in it that caught my eye, "Why do dumb people succeed more in business than smart people." I dont remember exactly the title but it was an 8 to 10 page article that went into detail comparing high IQ people to average or low IQ people and why people with lower average IQ did better in business. The article was filled with graphs and case studies and was very interesting. But the last paragraph really summarized it best, "Smart people consistently over analyzed risk and talked themselves out of taking risks while someone with a lower IQ didnt even think about the risk and jumped in with both feet and took chances." It gets back to the saying "No risk / No reward". I remember that article to this day and always do a gut check when it comes to evaluating new risks. Sometimes I second voice my old European grandfather who was all about hard work in a different industry but his life lessons hold true. Turning off the brain chatter and clearly evaluating a situation is critical but it s very hard because intelligent people, and humans in general, like to avoid risk and the temporary unpleasant pain that accompanies it.

agent00f 12y ago
I wonder if such studies are susceptible to bad stats of confirmation bias as many business studies are. What I mean is whether they had proper controls to assess whether each average person is more likely to succeed than each "smart" person given the same scenario. If they instead took a bunch of successful people, figured out that a lot of them weren't that "smart", then it could be the product of there being a lot more average than smart folk. In other words, "smart" doesn't guarantee business success such that all successful businesspeople are IQ gods, but we all knew that.

mtdewcmu 12y ago

The more I think about this and reread it, the more smug and self-serving it sounds, and the more difficult it becomes to believe that this manages to pass for a gem of wisdom and sage advice. It is nothing but a negative stereotype of people with high IQs as being essentially lazy and entitled. What motive is there to stereotype people with high intelligence? It sounds like sour grapes. Couldn't it be true, though? The history of similar stereotypes isn't good; lazy and entitled is one of the all-time most popular stereotypes of any despised out-group, and I suspect it hasn't been the go-to slander because it has a superior likelihood of turning out to be true and defensible. Here's a one-word rebuttal: doctors. We adopt stereotyped beliefs simply because of how they make us feel. Ordinarily, intelligent people would seem to make a poor target, because it's a group that, by definition, is distinguished by superiority, having as its sole determinant a very high IQ. It's not so easy to identify who around you might be in this group, and to attack it, you would seem to have to admit being less intelligent. The built-in requirement to demean your own intelligence along the way could almost just poison any possible benefit of stereotyping. But -- I'm not familiar with the name Max Klein, and it's such a combination of common names that it's almost ideal for being impervious to Google. From context and clues, though, I gather that this person must have achieved some amount of fame due to some startup-related achievement. I speculated in another comment that if anything could confer a license to feel superior to practically anyone, it would be having a successful startup. Who wouldn't want one, and by virtue of having it, in a way you are smarter than PhDs and Nobel Prize winners. The source largely makes no difference, though. You can judge a piece of writing completely on its own merits. This particular piece of writing falls apart under closer examination.

dwaltrip 12y ago
You are over analyzing this. The author isn't deriding those with intelligence, he simply said it can sometimes provide a false sense of assurance. He also implied that in a start up, hard work matters more than raw intelligence, but intelligence can provide some advantage.
- mtdewcmu 12y ago
  I'm not sure if I'm reading too much in, or if most people miss what it actually said and mentally insert platitudes. Even if it hedges all of its statements at some point and ends on a perfectly nonoffensive note, it still seems like a mediocre essay, because then it has absolutely nothing to say and uses a lot of words to say nothing. "Your IQ will kill your Startup" sounds like bold language to me. At the very least, there are overtones of anti-intellectualism. I don't see why HN is receptive to that.

graycat 12y ago

The title of this post > Your high IQ will kill your startup is too strong to be correct: The claim of "will kill" is claiming too much; 'might kill' is closer to being correct. In more detail, the OP essentially assumes that an intelligent person will try to 'coast' or 'relax' and depend just on their intelligence instead of working hard, learning more that is important, and doing the actual work needed for success. This assumption need not be correct in all cases, and my experience indicates that it is significantly wrong. Why? The OP mentions early school where intelligent people do well easily. Well, then, commonly they also get motivated to continue on in school. By the time they get to some junior/senior level courses in their major, to courses in graduate school, to the published peer-reviewed papers as background for their research, and to their Ph.D, research, they necessarily will have plenty of opportunities to encounter material where they have to work their little fingers, toes, and tails off. E.g., in computer science, if really intelligent, then jump all the way to tenured full professor in one stroke, just settle the question P versus NP. So far apparently no one has been intelligent enough to solve that problem. I've seen plenty of really intelligent people work their fingers, toes, and tails off in graduate school. Net, there are plenty of challenges in graduate school strong enough for the most intelligent people to have to work their fingers, toes, and tails off with levels of hard work that would compare with hard work from anyone from a galley slave, a dirt farmer, etc. Often, including in parts of school, intelligence alone is not enough, and plenty of intelligent people are smart enough to see this point. And, in cases of work challenges, since their pride from their intelligence is being tested, usually in a sense that is at least semi-public and, thus, visible to others from whom the person wants respect, they are motivated to do the real work needed for success. While the OP is claiming too much, it is possible for intelligent people to fail and for various reasons quite different from what the OP explained.

dang 12y ago
> The claim of "will kill" is claiming too much; 'might kill' is closer to being correct You're right, and we applied your edit. That was a bit of linkbait that snuck through. So is "your" in the title, for that matter, but we'll leave that.