<p>This is always striking to me. Terman found this, too. A selected group of bright people doesn’t display the “stellar achievement” one would expect of them. There’s two ways to see this. 1) Raw intelligence isn’t so important. OR 2) Among really smart people the consensus is that “achievement” isn’t so important.</p>
<p>From my own personal observation, there are many very smart people, or at least people who score on the high end of IQ tests, standardized tests, etc, but there aren’t that many people who are both smart AND creative. That probably accounts for the lack of the “wow factor in terms of stellar achievement.”</p>