Ismael Camara
Mrs. Behrend
AP Seminar
November 23, 2015
The Relationship Between Intelligence and Success Many wonder what goes on in the minds of billionaires such as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. There are a large amount successful people in the world, from the wealthybillionaires, to scientists, to movie stars. We may ask ourselves what allows them to achieve such success, and as we break down their paths to riches, we realize that there may be one key to achieving such success: intelligence. Most of these people who have achieved their goals have used their intelligence of their field to make it further than those who do notn 't use their intelligence (Skakoon). Intelligence has a very noticeable relation to success and achievement. Intelligence helps to determines academic success, workplace success, and social success, but is not fully responsible for all successes. To determine how intelligence affects success, we must ask ourselves what success really is. Success is usually seen by most as either academic success or, of success in a profession. This is because these forms of success can be measured, in the form of money and grades. However, success can be a multitude of things, such as academic, workplace, social, and emotional success. Success varies from person to person. It may be that one person values the success of their academic career more than the success of their social status. Others may find that their work gives them a sense of achievement.
Having the mind and determination to become successful isn’t an easy task. Success isn’t considered a gift, it should be a hard task to achieve and it matters how it is accomplished. Success
By definition, success is a person or thing that achieves desired aims or attains prosperity. How an individual reaches the point of success is “not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky- but all critical to making them who they are” (285). Throughout the book, Outliers by Malcom Gladwell, the pieces of the secret to success are put together. Three parts of success include pure luck, the amount of time and effort put into working to achieve your goal and where you come from.
I feel that in order to achieve personal success in our society you need 3 key things. For one, you need to have determination. In our culture, we seem to have a universal ideology along the lines of “keep going, and you will succeed eventually.” I feel that these idea’s are incredibly true, and have been shown to be effective every time. A good example of this trait in one of the texts we read is in the Odyssey when Odysseus needed to get back home, and despite the odds being against him, he never gave up. He always kept going, and when the going got rough, he got back right up and started over again. Another trait is intelligence. Because we have gone away from warrior culture in modern times, academic success is more than mandatory to achieve
The relationship between intelligence and work related outcomes has been found through various empirical studies. A longitudinal studies found that there is a positive moderate correlation (.51) between IQ at 12 years of age and occupational level and a slightly higher correlation (.53) between IQ at 12-year-old and income (.53) aged 40-50. (Judge, Higgins, Thoresen, Barrick, 1999) Thus, we can see that IQ level plays a significant role on work related outcomes from this empirical study. In addition, another study found that IQ level has a low correlation (.23) with performance within low complexity jobs whereas IQ has a strong correlation (.58) with performance in high complexity jobs. (Hunter & Hunter, 1984; See Schmidt & Hunter, 2004 for an overview) To put it another way, high intelligence is not essential for low complexity jobs, for example, waiter and cleaner does not require high IQ. On the contrary, high intelligence is crucial for complex jobs since it represents high reasoning and mental capabilities. Thus, it is not hard to see that individuals’ behaviour at work will be remarkably
There are many different understandings of what success is. Some relate success to money, others relate success to happiness, but it all depends on the type of person.
Smart people can categorize their strengths and weakness giving them the opportunity to leverage those strengths and weaknesses. Successful and intelligent people have the ability to evaluate, and analyze their abilities. This is different compared to Spearman's g factor because it elaborates how intelligent people can be successful and excel in life (Nevid, 2015).
The meaning of "success" has numerous interpretations, whether it is your own or society's definition. Within Outliers author Malcolm Gladwell explains that being successful has nothing to do with what kind of person you are, so whether you are intelligent and hardworking or lazy and aloof, it depends on your circumstances growing up. Whether your parents happen to be immigrants, you are one of the smartest men in the country or you make a habit of practicing an activity for a certain amount of hours a day, your own personal success, according to Gladwell is defined by the conditions you grew up in; the idea of being successful varies from culture to culture, therefore, there is no definite meaning of success other than one's interpretation.
Knowledge and intelligence are specific characteristic traits that can lead us to experiencing professional success. Suppose a child scores within the 135-140 range on an IQ test. People would assume that child will become successful in life based on their high IQ score. The question is, how are certain people able to succeed in life while others tend to struggle? Is it solely based off their intelligence or IQ? Opportunities? Race and culture? In Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2” and “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes”, two chapters taken from his book Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), claims that there is a misunderstanding on what success is and how it can be achieved. Gladwell feels that the idea of having an
To be successful has many interpretations, whether it be your own, from the dictionary or societies’ definition. Within Outliers author Malcolm Gladwell explains that being successful has nothing to do with what kind of person you are, so whether you’re intelligent and hardworking or lazy and aloof, it depends on your circumstances growing up. Whether your parents happen to be immigrants, you’re one of the smartest men in the country or you practice like there’s no tomorrow, your own personal success, according to Gladwell is defined by the conditions you grew up in; the idea of being successful varies from culture to culture and because of that there is no definite meaning of successful other than one’s interpretation.
Success is an effective word that society uses to define what set of achievements an individual creates for themselves. Based on society, success is one’s ability, intelligence, and how gifted an individual is. However, In “Outliers The Story of Success” Malcolm Gladwell argues that it does not matter if an individual is talented, smart, or driven, it does not mean that they will achieve up to their full abilities. Gladwell believes that the way to success is by an endless amount of practice, timing, and opportunity one is given and whether or not the individual sees and takes advantage of that opportunity.
Most of us have similar opinion about the term of success. Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outlier, have different assumption than most us, such as the link to success, what people overvalue, and what we undervalue. First, what links to success? There are many circumstance that effect you chance to success. To begin with, talent is one of the conditions that leads you to the success. For example, having better trait compare to other individual will make yourself outstanding, so you have the better chance being hire. Additionally, without effort, you chance become success for will likely to decrease. For instance, even if you were born talented, without the effort, you will not be able to make use of it. In the end, you basically wasted your
The definition of intelligence has strongly been debated over for many centuries, and many individuals have their arguments for what it is. So what is really the true meaning of intelligence? Some, such as college professor of psychology, Carol S. Dweck, strongly believes that intelligence is something achieved through large amounts effort and having optimistic mindsets as inferred in her article, “The Secret to Raising Smart Kids”. However, on the other hand, successful author of best selling novel “Steve Jobs”, Walter Isaacson, claims that intelligence is an abstract idea that is derived from ingenuity and applying creativity to life and other material concepts. With almost completely opposite sets of beliefs, it is likely that Dweck will not agree with Isaacson’s nation of intelligence being derived from natural intuition rather than raw intelligence.
When a person utters the word “intelligence,” people tend to think of a genius like Albert Einstein developing some obscure equation that the great majority of the population will never understand. The problem with the definition of intelligence is that people relate intelligence to words like “genius” which require intelligence but do not have the same definition as intelligence. Often, people try to use related words to define intelligence, but these words are unable to define intelligence since many are only different levels of intelligence. While many definitions try to encompass the meaning of intelligence and various definitions describe a small part of intelligence, no definition completely explains intelligence, because
Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, discusses the idea of intelligence being more than a matter of cognitive ability. In part one and two of the book, Goleman discusses how the brain processes emotions. In these chapters the author describes the cortex and the limbic system. Rationality is job of the cortex while the limbic system processes your emotions. He suggests that the emotional intelligence can be a learned skill. In the next chapter Daniel Goleman uses studies to show that many high IQ scoring students have underperformed in their lives while many average people have become huge successes. Goleman stated that if the IQ scoring has little to do with success and that your 80% success is based on your emotional intelligence.
Academic success is largely attributed to intellectual ability in everyday life, even though this supports the literature that is intellectual ability does have a large role over academic success it is only one of many factors that can influence academic success, in this study the effect of intellectual ability will be tested against academic success of students to verify and reproduce the results that exist in abundance within multiple studies (Chamorro-Premuzic & Arteche, 2008). Therefore, we will be testing whether the relationship between intellectual ability and academic performance is significant or not. This constructs the first hypothesis for the study: