Does Intelligence Equate To Success In Life?

Dec
15
2008

Does Intelligence Equate To Success In Life?

If you haven’t already noticed the recent turn of events, there has been a sort of trend occuring whereby intelligence doesn’t necessarily bring with it guaranteed good fortune and success in life. The world has changed and being intelligent doesn’t normally equate to being a successful person. I mean look at the example of the blue whale. It has a monstrous brain, but it still doesn’t know how to avoid whalers or use its immense size and weight to capsize some of these pirates who try to use their meat for profit. The reason why some highly intelligent people fail to find success in life is because they lack certain skills, communicative ones especially. Can a blue whale raise a protest? Not really.

Ok let’s get real. Intelligence is a preposition in life that makes you think that you are better than a lot of the rabble that surrounds you. That intelligence can blind these very people from the insensitivies that they exude and how others view them. Often, people who pride themselves of being intelligent and openly flaunt their impressive IQs are the ones living the delusion that because they are intelligent, success is a sure thing for them.

This is a distance that develops whether or not they realise it and sometimes, a person can be disliked simply because of his or her intelligence. This distance is sometimes so far apart that it gets to the position where one side of the fence can’t listen to each other, the messages get garbled and miscommunication sets in. One side thinks the other is stupid and the other thinks they are haughty. And most of the time it is the intelligent people who lose themselves in this translation. They become unpopular with most of the people around them; they become reclusive and start to have a low opinion on everyone around them in the constant journey to find intelligent conversation. They get ostracized in community and this leads to what people called a deficient personality and a ’super ego inferiority complex’. The result? A massive loss of confidence that no doubt affects the way they relate to others, and coupled with what might have been a lack in communicative skills in the first place, it’s a guaranteed one-way paved road to failure.

It doesn’t help that they get a culture shock - especially when they leave college (the haven of most of the intellectuals) and realise success and riches don’t always and sometimes never come naturally with intelligence. The sudden revelation that intelligence does not always equate to success will lead them further down the path of failure. While some might think this is a dramatic picture to paint, it is sometimes the end result of some people - people who get so involved in this mindset and get so disappointed in the real world that they become stunted, emotionally and lose all ability to communicate with the world outside them. Once the lose all form of self confidence and their capability for success, they end up stuck in such a frame of mind, and getting out of such a state can prove to be a monumental task indeed.