Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)

This article is more about perseverance and hard work then it is about intelligence.

1. IQ

2. Think he meant necessary.

At first (before I RTFA) I was going to come here to disagree vehemently. There are severe founder-quality issues right now and a lot of that has to do with low-IQ people who failed out of banking or management consulting getting funded, while actually smart people with less social polish get fuck-all. 140+ IQ doesn't mean much, but I'd fund a 140+ over a well-connected douchebag any day of the year. The problem is that so many not-smart people (Spiegel, Duplan) are getting funded and it's generating such a slew of crap companies that the rising generation (Millennials) may have lost the knowledge necessary to build good ones.

Then I RTFA and found that I agree, wholeheartedly. The metaphor he gives is of an overconfident assailant who has a knife, but is untrained and is beaten by a bare-handed opponent.

Correctly, we assess our enemies in office politics as being stupider. That VP/NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who-The-Fuck-Knows) doesn't know what a monad is. He probably couldn't write a for-loop to save his own dick. Those bikeshedding "big picture guys" who "do product" aren't intellectually sophisticated people. All that said, they continue to beat the piss out of us in the game of office politics. They do nothing but, somehow, get paid twice as much and get to make a lot of decisions that we ought to be making. As a group, we have to stop fucking moping, figure out why, and change it.

Too many software engineers are so self-congratulatory about their intellectual ability, and too easily swayed by bullshit perks, to realize that they're actually getting robbed blind by jerks in The Business who aren't nearly as smart (they don't have the knife) but who've been training at social machination and in dominating other people for as long as we've been studying computers.

We have to stop thinking it's "dirty" or undignified or unprofessional to "get political" and figure out a way to get our due. We have to stop putting our heads in the sand and saying "I just want to code". We are a hard-working group (even the smart ones work really hard) but we need to accept that some of that hard work is going to have to involve learning CS 666 (software politics), as ugly as the skill may be, and playing to win, to fucking demolish our enemies instead of having them defeat us.

I think it suggests that a big part of success is luck. He was lucky that man didn't really know how to use the knife or intend to kill him with it.

Anyway forget the mugging analogy because it is a stretch and distracts from useful information.

First, people aren't so much smarter than others than they think. People who persevere are more likely to be "lucky", since they keep trying until they are "lucky".

Another huge aspect of this is self-identity. If you think you are supposed to be a consulting VP, then you can be. Most people don't think that.

Another huge aspect of success is advantage. This can be in the form of a social network or just having a slightly well-off uncle to give a loan at an important time. Or it can just be physical health.

When it comes down to it, circumstances play a larger role than I think most people in our current structure want to believe. This is not a machine that rewards merit.

There is also a strange focus on the individual in this mindset.

But I go back to the belief that innate intelligence differences between humans are generally not nearly as great as we think they are. I also think that often circumstantial difficulties can be overcome, if there is enough perseverance. So I think one of the most important factors may be identity. In other words, who do you think you are?

Being poor completely sucks. Watching your cat die from cancer that you can't afford to treat sucks.

The point of getting rich is so that your life doesn't suck. Not to compare yourself to others.

Getting rich is necessarily hard, otherwise everyone would be on the road to becoming rich. People are unlikely to get rich by doing work which satisfies. But if they make it, then at least life won't suck anymore.