Q: My IQ is at around 151 (Mensa). What can I expect to achieve in life?
You can expect to achieve absolutely nothing!
This is like saying, “I have a race car engine. How fast can I go?”
Well, buddy, you need the rest of the car, and unfortunately nature will not always match your engine with all the rest of the mechanical parts in your car. All the parts are randomly chosen and then forced to fit together.
The “rest of the car” in this case is both your physical self, and your emotional self, all you have proven with an IQ test is that you are capable of fast analytical problem solving. That doesn’t automatically make you well-adjusted emotionally, it doesn’t automatically make you an athlete, it doesn’t mean anybody will love you or you will love them, it doesn’t mean you will make a ton of money.
Here is the key you will learn when you get older. It may take time, but I’m giving you the hint now, so you’ll recognize it more quickly than I did: Emotions are king, and will ultimately determine your fate. Not rationality, that is a servant to your emotions, and it will always be.
The neocortex is called that because it evolved recently; before that we were ruled by instincts and emotions and very limited reasoning power, like all other animals. Well, in this case evolution worked by adding something new, not subtracting. Before the neocortex, our instincts and emotions were completely in charge of our actions, and guess what? They STILL hold the throne!
There is an “accidental” brain experiment with a man that lost his amygdalae in surgery (basically the structures that act as an emotional clearing house) to excise a brain tumor. As a result, he was rational, he could solve math problems, ace quizzes, he did not lose any of his intellect. But he was incapacitated anyway, because he could not make decisions. Asked to pick out clothes for a day, he dithered in the closet for hours, until he had to go to the bathroom. And narrating what he was doing, he could endlessly analyze and come up with reasons to pick one shirt over another, depending on who he might meet, where he might go, what the weather would be, and never come to a conclusion.
You might think he’d get bored or angry or frustrated and just grab a shirt: Nope. Those are emotions. He wasn’t embarrassed by taking so long; he didn’t hate himself, he didn’t worry about what it meant that he could not make a decision. All emotions. In essence, he just did not LIKE any shirt more than another, and he had no rational reason to pick one over another. So his intellect just came up with one thing after another to present to the king (the amygdalae), which was dead on the throne and never indicated to the intellect “I prefer that option.”
Now bladder pain, hunger, muscles and joints hurting and getting tired from standing too long; those are not emotions, and he knew how to respond to that. Physical discomfort is a thing; but also not intellect. Given orders, he knew how to respond to that.
So what is the evolutionary role of Intellect, then? It is a SERVANT to your physical and emotional self, and provides you information, projections and predictions, and understanding for you to emotionally react to.
Why stay in school, when, emotionally it would be much more satisfying to have some money by getting a job? Your intellect will project those two futures, in one you likely have a better job and better life, in the other your short-term indulgences will lead to lesser jobs and a more difficult life. And when you emotionally consider one of those options better than another, the intellect has done its job and you stay in school, despite the short term allure of not being a broke ass student.
You have to learn to manage your emotions, delay gratification, and your intellect can help you with that, but it also depends on your emotional constitution right now. The Intellect can let you breeze through school and college. Mine let me finish a Bachelor’s in Mathematics in 3 years flat, and my Master’s in same in 18 months. It let me go to college for 12 years, earning five degrees with a 4.0 GPA, including my PhD.
Academic success is yours, and getting it will help you become financially successful, because our society pays (literally and figuratively) way too much regard to advanced college degrees.
But your emotions can derail all that. Mensa itself has studied this; their members are not all successful, even in their own judgment, not all of them are living happily ever after. They have had members get addicted to drugs, get defrauded, go to jail for committing impulsive crimes. They have had high IQ women that got pregnant and bore children at 15. Mensans end up as janitors, truck drivers, and Amazon warehouse workers. Mensans have struggled with depression, and committed suicide. Mensans have attempted stupid stunts and ended up paralyzed for life. Mensans become obese and diabetic and get diseases because they cannot control their eating, their depression, or resist impulsive temptations.
And guess what? All of that shit at about the same rate as the general population that is NOT high IQ.
Why? Because emotions rule our lives. The best thing you can do with your intellect is not to “gain control” of your emotions; you cannot dethrone the King and should not try. But what your intellect CAN do is manipulate the King, learn to convince yourself to choose the best balanced outcome of short, intermediate and long term gains.
Should you study Computer Science and within that Algorithmic Science, there is an interesting class of Algorithms called “Greedy Algorithms”. Greedy algorithm – Wikipedia
. The hallmark of such algorithms is that always choosing the optimal short term solution is guaranteed to produce the optimal long term solution, so it is very easy.
That is how basic animals work, as if this is always true of the world. It is why we can trap them: We humans can devise traps so the optimal short term solution for the animal will NOT lead to their optimal long term solution, it will kill them instead. The rat taking the bite of cheese triggers a spring-loaded bar that breaks its neck. The deer chased by a human takes the route of fastest escape and lands in a concealed pit.
People have all that same Greedy Algorithm equipment built in. The purpose of the intellect is to let you defeat this very strong tendency to choose the optimal short term solution, because the Greedy Algorithm does NOT solve all problems. Animals, and us, evolved emotions to use the Greedy Algorithm because it is the simplest and easiest algorithm to implement, one step up from the random action of bacteria and viruses.
The intellect is there to help you accurately predict the consequences and outcomes of your actions in the future, so your emotions can make an informed choice about what will give you the most emotional gratification in the long term, or at least for as far as you can see the future.
There is often a tendency amongst the high IQ crowd to put undue importance on the value of their intellect. They want to “Spock it out,” dismiss emotions as unimportant.
Well, Spock is mythical bullshit, humans don’t work like that, so figure that out as soon as you can. The point of life is emotions, and the best thing you can do with your intellect is use it and delayed gratification diligently to ensure you live a happy life, find love, avoid fear and embarrassment and prison and disease and disability, work at a job you love that uses your talents.
There is no point in being smart if it doesn’t make you happy. You have been gifted with a superior ability to solve problems and understand consequences. A bigger hammer to solve life’s problems, or avert them altogether. But it is useless if you don’t use it, there is no point in being proud of just owning a big hammer, you need to use it.
And remember that your Intellect is a servant to your emotions, it isn’t there to replace them, but to inform them, so you can resist short term gratification when your intellect sees it is likely to sabotage your long term future. That is how you avoid being trapped like an animal and suffering at the hands of others.
– Tony Castaldo
