You may believe that your highest value is you being smart and you see the world through this lens. It could be central in all your activities because all that you heard as you grew up was praise about your smartness, where you graduated from, how brainy you are…
When you meet somebody, you may seek to judge people for their high (or low) intellect, the school they graduated from, how much education they have, papers they’ve published, books or articles they’ve written, speeches they’ve given, or awards they’ve received. You want to ‘peg’ their intellect quickly.
In a mixed group of people with varying intellect, you may overestimate the value of intellect (that you bring), and devalue other skills required (that you may lack, and others could bring) to complete a given task. This high-intellect attitude could make you reluctant to delegate tasks to others. For example, you may hesitate to assign responsibility to a person who you judge to be intellectually inferior. The person may have a great rapport with a particularly difficult manager from playing cards with him weekly, and get a favorable decision that you may not be able to get with your intellect or reasoning.
Successful people know that they can be more effective when they delegate certain tasks to others with complementary skills. They become more effective by doing what they do well, and delegating the rest.
Sometimes, you’ll need help from people without a high IQ, who may bring complementary value to your project/life/business. Or, it could be somebody who’s been in the industry longer. For example, you may know a lot about creating software, but to improve the user experience, you will need help from the sales and customer support reps. They may have no clue about how to write complex software code like you do… but, know how to improve the user experience.
Find people with complementary skills and leverage them so you can go farther with your intellect. After all, isn’t that what being smart is about?
Ask yourself:
- Who should you value more in your life?
- What kind of complementary people do you need to become more successful?
I’m an MIT grad who’s spent years thinking about this. I even hired 2 psychologists to dig into this. We researched the reasons intelligent people struggle to succeed and found that they boil down to 15 basic psychological reasons. If you know which of those are ‘holding you back’, you can mitigate them to become more successful. We designed an assessment to help you figure out if you have any of these impediments.
You can take the assessment by clicking this link: https://www.businessthinking.com/assessments/are-you-smart-but-not-successful/
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