Intelligence vs. "horsepower"

Parent Cafe
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<p>…depending on the college, and the offerings there.
…depending on whether they’ve applied themselves enough in h.s. with the (oh, yawn, pity me) “uninteresting” work which tests whether they can perform across the board – in and out of passion.
…depending on whether lack of performance in “uninteresting” (to them) subjects and tasks lands them, or does not, in a college both where professors inspire them and there are enough true intellectual peers to light their mental fires & enable them to discover passions. </p>

<p>Yes, 3togo, I agree with you in theory, and I see that all the time in my work. The problem is that too many students do not see that a relatively challenging college (matching their true mental power – genius or not) is a necessary step for most white collar employment in this country. And college admissions is not about non-performed passion or unlocated passion. Lots of other candidates will have both: brilliance + performance, not to mention at least a generalized passion.</p>

<p>I think we’re talking about two different things here, or perhaps 3: genius, the discovery of passion, and the application of passion (and/or genius). Sometimes the second one is, yes, delayed (for a variety of reasons – not all of them because previous work is “uninteresting,” but sometimes because a student grows up and realizes that not all of schooling, let alone life, is meant to be sustained ecstasy.)</p>

<p>And if they discover that passion only in college, even then, in the adult continuation of that, such passion will alternate or be accompanied by a fair amount of monotony & ennui, at least now and then.</p>

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<p>I’m not a fan of prima donna slackers. The ones who can’t motivate themselves to do what isn’t interesting to them, are the business interns who don’t rise to a management position in the company because they think they’re beneath learning the ropes first by spending some time in the warehouse. A good friend in high school asked my opinion of her boyfriend. I told her he seems nice enough, but a little unmotivated (recreational pot smoker too). She said, “Well, he’s motivated to do what he wants to do!” Well duh! Motivation isn’t terribly necessary for what’s fun and enjoyable! She ended up marrying him, only to complain years later that he wasn’t motivated to better himself in his career by looking for a higher level job in a different company. He was still at the same company where he started out. By the way, he was just laid off and has only ever developed one set of skills–the ones he likes.</p>

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<p>^Oh now, majoring in business and being a manager…now there is a hotbed for finding one’s passion if ever there was :)</p>

<p>I think some folks are completely missing the point I and some others are raising. I feel bad I wasn’t able to explain it well. </p>

<p>I was not talking about motivation around particular boring tasks or only doing what is fun…I’m talking about when the CORE of ones work life and purpose (be it ‘doing grade X’ or “majoring in Y” or a career as a “Z”) is out of synch with one’s talents, passions and ways of learning. </p>

<p>No matter where one ends up, there are parts that will be boring, or suck, hurdles to jump, or days, weeks that are dreadful, courses that are terrible. But when what the majority of one’s purpose involves things that don’t jive with one’s being, many will not be motivated nor particular good at what they do either. </p>

<p>Even ones with engines that run fast everywhere are not a pretty sight when they are running their engines for the wrong reasons. I see TONS of children majoring in business- because I teach it - and while some are truly cut out for it and love it, so many are there simply because their parents told them to or its the safe path to “x”. They dont’ even know what accounting IS when they signed up for it. Oy. Sure they work hard, we call them grinders, and I would never hire one of them. They work for the grades, memorize great, and often entirely miss the big picture and the whole point of it all because their heads are buried cramming for a test and they aren’t really there to learn for its own sake. They aren’t connected, they aren’t really interested, and nor are they particularly interest<em>ing</em> either. They are there for the wrong reasons, in the wrong environment for them…and they’d be likely entirely different students in some other discipline. It just makes me sad, what a waste of youth. </p>

<p>Others on here might justify their soul-sucking jobs, or bad career decisions, but it doesn’t have to be that way for our kids, at least not if we encourage them to find out who they really are and what their natural talents and interests are, and discover what they <em>really</em> want to do, and where they really belong (at least as much as we encourage them to ‘work hard’ or ‘achieve’).</p>

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<p>You’re making amazing assumptions about people you don’t know. Sorry to disappoint; my job is anything but “soul-sucking.” (Speak for yourself: Is yours?) </p>

<p>“Who they really are” and “what their talents are” depend also on inconvenient work and effort. In fact, sometimes both passion & “genius” are discovered via work & effort.</p>

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<p>^^^epiphany, I think the point starbright was making was that your job is NOt soul-sucking because you are where you belong, given your talents and interests. There are many people in the world however, who because of circumstance, find themselves in a life that is not a match for their talents and if the mismatch is bad enough the job becomes soul-sucking. </p>

<p>If you find your passion & genius through work and effort then you most likely have found that good match. Clearly you have. But if you put forth tremendous effort and still find no passion, no interest, then perhaps the problem lies not with you, but with the mismatch of your talents and your job.</p>

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<p>I have encouraged D to study/major in the things that inspire her. They happens to be writing and theater, so I find myself defending our decision to let her major in this at a private school. I am a parent who believes that it will all work out, but a lot of people are uncomfortable with that.</p>

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<p>Methinks we’re talking in circles here, lololu and FallGirl. As I indicated upthread, several topics are being overlapped: the discovery of passion (and I assure you mine was not birthed from “work and effort” but from my soul, as a young child); the existence of “genius” or special intellectual gift/ability; and the performance of either or both.</p>

<p>My point is merely that neither genius nor passion is sufficient, without work. I think this is what GFG is saying, too, and some posters on Page 1. No college and no employer can be expected to trust that you’re a genius, if you have nothing to show for that. </p>

<p>I see a ton of cases, in my work, of high school boys who believe they shouldn’t have to bother with the details of homework, studying for classroom tests, etc., that rather, three things: (1) Teachers (of any subject) should not assign work that the student personally doesn’t find exciting, and expect the student to perform; (2) Teachers and college admissions officers should reward the student for the supposed “genius” he has shown in whatever non-academic recreational pursuits which have substituted for academics; (3) undemonstrated, latent “potential” should be a ticket to college admissions and a career.</p>

<p>In 100% of such cases there has been no signfiicant redirection of such assumptions, on the part of parents. None. Zero. Zip. Sometimes it’s just that nothing particularly counteractive has been said. In other cases, the parents have explicitly supported such assumptions. (Oh, and by the way, while the parents say that to me, they expect me to turn around supposedly gifted Joey into elite college material by my supposedly forcibly changing Joey’s study habits. All by my little lonesome.)</p>

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<p>Seems like nearly every time I read an article about Mensa there is at least one example given of a Mensa member who possesses some sky-high IQ and not much else - no achievements to speak of, low-income menial job, dropped out of school, but boy what a “genius.” </p>

<p>To those types I say keep your high IQ. Give me the high horsepower people any day.</p>

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<p>Starbright, I enjoyed your post and agree with you. Your description of many business majors made me chuckle (and I’m an MBA) because my daughter always says that the kids she knows majoring in business are the kids who don’t know what they want to do when they graduate. </p>

<p>There was a thread here not too long ago about regrets and mine is that I wasn’t brave enough to go into Architecture because I was afraid I wouldn’t be good at it…now I wonder “what if”. Because of that, I began encouraging my daughter early on to “find her passion” because if you get up every day to do something you love, life can be so much more fulfilling. And that it’s ok to take a risk and fail…no risk, no gain. I also began telling my child when she was in elementary school that school was her job, just like I had to go to work every day, her job was to do her best at school every day even if she didn’t feel like it or found it boring. No excuses. I believe work ethic is developed by expectations at home and by example, not totally intrinsically.</p>

<p>Genius without work ethic is to waste a gift, imo.</p>

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<p>Do people take Mensa seriously? Anyone scoring in the top 2% of many different tests can join. I found out that I qualified based on a Miller Analogy Test I took back in the 70s. Really good at analogies - yes. Genius - no. I count on my fingers. </p>

<p>I also agree that intellect without the horsepower often goes unnoticed. </p>

<p>If a person is a genius, but no one knows it, is the person still a genius?</p>

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<p>This was pretty much my mother’s mantra when we were kids. I say the same thing to my kids. Here’s to hoping they say the same thing to the grandkids. :)</p>

<p>I see two kinds of genius. There’s the type that is just a little quicker and a little harder working than me. Then there’s the type that produces ideas or solutions to problems totally out of left field. Their brains just work in a fundamentally different way.</p>

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<p>I have no interest in joining mensa. I have a relative who has because it helps her socially. That’s a good reason but I don’t need that.</p>

<p>Genius is rarely needed. Competence is usually more important. For example, we have a handful of beautiful bridges and many thousands of functional ones. If you confine the discussion to the rarest, then you’ve established an artificial context in which genius is more common. Take music. Most commercial music is competent, whether pop, jazz or classical. Only a few names survive over time. If we focus on Mozart, then it seems we need a lot of Mozarts and miss the point that there’s only been one. His works may seem to dominate repertory now and then - sometimes to the point of ubiquity - but they were and are a tiny fraction of actual professional output and performance.</p>

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<p>In my college class, there were several absolutely brilliant students who could solve any math problem on the fly or draw the mechanism of any chemical reaction with their eyes closed. I always thought that these geniuses were destined to make discoveries that would rock the scientific world or at least get them a Nobel Pize. Once in a while I would look up their names in the scientific literature and patent databases - nope, nothing… These guys were not exactly hard-working types…</p>

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<p>Life is a breath mint and a candy mint.</p>

<p>There is such a thing as intellectual talent (although Malcolm Gladwell argues that we attribute too much to character and too little to 10000 hours of hard work). Innate talent without discipline and drive does not lead to much. </p>

<p>Per Lergnom’s post, genius or lots of intellectual talent is frequently not needed. In fact, I suspect that in many jobs, too much intellectual talent – too high an IQ – would probably harm performance. In many sales jobs, incorrigible optimism might actually be preferable to someone who carefully analyzes the situation and correctly figures out what the probabilities of success are. In many sales positions, the work can be relatively repetitive – you have more or less the same sales pitch – and while there are things that one can do in terms of researching and understanding and listening to the customer, many such positions would offer relatively low intellectual challenge. Some with a high IQ who really gets pleasure in thinking would probably perform poorly compared to someone who has a lower IQ but likes working with and talking to people. Ditto for lots of corporate and government positions I can think of.</p>

<p>But, there are places where high levels of intellect really are valuable or necessary. Research in the physical and life sciences are areas where it is hard to imagine low wattage but high horsepower people being successful (to mix a metaphor). Our world is a complex place and I’m glad we have a president with the intellectual capacity to see the complexity and interrelationships of many disparate things (although I often don’t agree with his approach). While intelligence is probably highly beneficial to being President, drive, an ability to connect with people, and a sense of how to maintain and increase power are probably more important than IQ.</p>

<p>But, for fun, I leave you with one comment:</p>

<p>During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to
Adlai E Stevenson, ‘Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!’
Stevenson called back ‘That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!’</p>

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<p>Just Mensa members - plus perhaps the occasional journalist writng a feature article about it.</p>