I don't think the knife analogy is a great one. High IQ is more like having a ladder, in a world of cliffs. Someone can train themselves to jump higher than a ladder which is relatively short, but a ladder of two or three standard deviations is no longer in that range. If you have a tall ladder, try to focus your efforts higher.
Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)
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Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)
#12Reminds me of the military.
Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)
#13I can't help but have heard this story before, perhaps by an HN user in another thread in the past. Didn't the Ofer fellow end up dieing in a robbery further down the line?
Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)
#14[deleted]
Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)
#15Choosing to fight a man with a knife who is trying to rob you is stupid and dangerous, regardless of your training. I'm not sure what this says about the thesis.
If anything, I think the article serves to boast on the author's intelligence. And we all know what it means when a man talks about his penis size..
Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)
#16To sound intentionally arrogant and possibly ignorant, this whole write-up is captain-obvious material.
It may be obvious but not worthless to write about.
Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)
#17I take issue with the assumption that you're not a success unless you're a VP at a consulting firm. In particularly the assertion that the other engineers in the story -- who for all we know may have preferred to remain in their roles -- have suffered some terrible fate that we need to be warned against.
Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)
#18Not everyone has a "I just moved to a foreign country and have to make a living somehow" moment.
Any specific advice for a person who found school easy and now has problems challenging themselves further in live?
Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)
#19I'm s glad to see an article like this on HN, as opposed to articles that attribute success to massive amounts of luck.
As far as I've experienced, both are required.
My dad has a version of this story. He was born in a village in Bangladesh and while he's not a VP at a "top 5" consulting company, he raised us upper middle class in an expensive DC suburb. He notes he was smart, but never the smartest person; hard working, but not the hardest working person; in addition to both, he was also very lucky.
There's an additional dimension too. Ambition and extroversion I guess. The smartest, hardest working people I know from undergrad are engineering PhD's toiling away on the tenure track. Failure according to the author.
Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)
#20IMHO, to continually put "success" above everything else in your life and slave away towards that goal as the ultimate redemption in everything is a waste of your time and therefore your life.
It can be such as easy sell, especially to people with low self-esteem... if only you were rich, had a great body, had success with the opposite sex, etc., etc. And always underlying it, but never spoken of, is the vain and self centered attempt to compare yourself to others and come out on top.
When these goals are achieved, rarely does anyone publicly say that it wasn't worth it. It's like a bad marriage rotting from the inside. No one wants to admit to being a fool. So stuff like this propagate, it's a beautiful lie. Rather than think of how awesome your life will be if you just work a little harder and achieve success, you might as well be talking about how great heaven will be as long as you follow some arbitrary religious text.
It's like you think someone out there is keeping score, and it's all some type of game which you can win. We came from nature, and in nature, nobody keeps score. Animals live and die on the basis of stupid luck all the time. On your death bed you probably won't be looking over your life and decide whether it was worthwhile or not, and give yourself some report card on it. Instead you more likely won't even remember more than bits and pieces, and then eventually die and forget it all.
The hero in the story is an Israeli soldier who decided to risk his life over a few dollars in his pocket. To do what, prove he was macho? He was really stupid in my book. And we're supposed to, according to the author, look up to this man? Train all our lives as a knife fighter, so we, too, can take dumb risks and be lucky enough to not get killed doing so? What if it went the other way, and the soldier friend was hurt or killed? Would the author still be putting him on a pedestal as he does so?
I'm not saying don't try. Just make sure you are enjoying what you are doing, first and foremost. If you're not happy, either motivate yourself in a positive way, or let it go. It really isn't worth it.