Is brilliance a curse as well?

Is brilliance a curse as well?

After years of consistently being outliers on the bell curve, brilliant people are supposed to take corporate world by storm. A school and college topper, with ranks in Chartered Accountancy, 99.45 percentile in CAT and an MBA from a premiere B-school as well.

But surprisingly, they often don’t conquer milestones in corporate life, their achievement levels are not in sync with the initial hype created in student life.

Often, they are walking encyclopedias – great individual performers, but don’t get along with a team with the so-called ‘less gifted’ mortals.

As Ernest Hemingway wrote: “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. Life for such people is often gripped by misery, as they are plagued by the sense that they had somehow failed to live up to their youthful expectations.

Isn’t this counter-intuitive?

Wasn’t innate intelligence the cornerstone of the ‘success theory’? We either had it or we didn’t.

Maybe, genius is just a comforting parable, deployed to explain why some people seem to have it all, but doesn’t accurately depict the full scope and scale of human intelligence

Intelligence is overrated and skills in “human engineering”, self-regulating your emotions, ability to communicate, negotiate, lead and of course, luck are what actually matter more than logical reasoning and data interpretation. No wonder, Google now tests candidates for qualities like intellectual humility, rather than sheer cognitive prowess.

WDYT?

Do you believe that a high IQ guarantees success?

What are the evaluation criteria set by corporate gatekeepers?

Do you employ some sort of a psychological measure of a candidate’s abilities as well?

Would love to hear your thoughts on this