Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)

> Your high IQ will kill your startup

is too strong to be correct: The claim of "will kill" is claiming too much; 'might kill' is closer to being correct.

In more detail, the OP essentially assumes that an intelligent person will try to 'coast' or 'relax' and depend just on their intelligence instead of working hard, learning more that is important, and doing the actual work needed for success. This assumption need not be correct in all cases, and my experience indicates that it is significantly wrong.

Why? The OP mentions early school where intelligent people do well easily. Well, then, commonly they also get motivated to continue on in school. By the time they get to some junior/senior level courses in their major, to courses in graduate school, to the published peer-reviewed papers as background for their research, and to their Ph.D, research, they necessarily will have plenty of opportunities to encounter material where they have to work their little fingers, toes, and tails off. E.g., in computer science, if really intelligent, then jump all the way to tenured full professor in one stroke, just settle the question P versus NP. So far apparently no one has been intelligent enough to solve that problem.

I've seen plenty of really intelligent people work their fingers, toes, and tails off in graduate school. Net, there are plenty of challenges in graduate school strong enough for the most intelligent people to have to work their fingers, toes, and tails off with levels of hard work that would compare with hard work from anyone from a galley slave, a dirt farmer, etc.

Often, including in parts of school, intelligence alone is not enough, and plenty of intelligent people are smart enough to see this point. And, in cases of work challenges, since their pride from their intelligence is being tested, usually in a sense that is at least semi-public and, thus, visible to others from whom the person wants respect, they are motivated to do the real work needed for success.

While the OP is claiming too much, it is possible for intelligent people to fail and for various reasons quite different from what the OP explained.

Bad managers are all about abusing the people under them to make themselves feel more important.

I agree but it's not that simple. Most bad managers (the garden variety bad ones, not the psychopaths) aren't trying to abuse the people under them, but are trying to make themselves look good at any cost.

They often look like they're making "hard choices" (i.e. choices against the interests of others in the organization, including their reports) in the interest of "getting the job done" but they're actually externalizing costs or pushing problems into the future.

I would say that good managers try to direct action toward the shared interests of the employees and the organization. Good management tries to prevent those kinds of conflicts, long before they've become obvious, because when the organization and employee play against each other, it starts getting bad for everyone. As you correctly mentioned, MBA culture is all about squeezing pennies out of every transaction, which endangers any hope of good will in the business.

If you are poor, no amount of book reading will convince you that you do not need money. What will convince you is not being poor. Only then will you feel like you are able to give others advice about how money is not important: and your advice will be as useless to them as similar advice was to you when you first heard it (and rightly so).

People with low self-esteem do not improve their condition by thinking themselves into happiness or forcing themselves to believe that everything is awesome. They improve it by actively working on those areas of their lives they feel bad about. If they are lucky and work hard enough - they might reach a stage where they realize how warped their thinking was, and many of the things they thought they wanted will no longer seem important. But you cannot "skip" this journey and go straight into the land of happiness simply because somebody who is already happy told you what the view is like from the other side. You have to get there yourself, even if part of your journey is based on a lie.