Intelligence and Success
This is a pretty touchy subject in my opinion, but one worth some attention. La Shawn Barber has opened this subject and she seems to be doing a pretty thorough job of addressing it. Her post titled Intelligence: Some Research is quite interesting.
I am one of those high scoring folks when it comes to qualification tests. I scored at the top on my military AFQT with a 99. I was also told that I scored higher than any applicant had ever scored when applying for a job in an oil refinery after discharging from the US Air Force. There were approximately 2000 people applying for five positions. I got hired. That test was a combined test of math, mechanics, and chemical knowledge. Most of it was the general IQ type of questions. I don’t know that I have ever taken a real IQ test, but I scored in the top 1% on the first Internet IQ test I ever took. I think that is pretty good from what their statistics said.
Now from the perspective of someone who has scored reasonably high on intelligence measuring tests, I will guarantee you that your score on these tests in itself has little impact on your overall success in life. I believe that success in life is mostly a choice and is definitely relative. By relative I mean that each person has a different scale for measuring success. By choice I mean that you have a choice in how you respond to the results of an situation where you “fail” to measure up. Yes, you needed to score good to even get an interview with that refinery mentioned earlier. If you measure success as getting a job in a refinery then I guess you are not very successful if you did not score high enough to get an interview. With that said I will acknowledge that a person’s ability to gather and retain information will help in becoming and remaining successful, but I do not believe it is the determining factor in most circumstances. What do I think is most important? I think that attitude, personality, education, motivation, social skills, and current social environment are all very important factors in just about career related success measurement.
I said that these tests within themselves have little to do with your level of success. I do believe that the way people let their view of themselves become degraded based on how they perform on these tests does affect success in life in general. How can it not? When you fail to get an interview for a job or you fail to get accepted into a college or you fail to get your first choice of jobs in the military, you can easily get depressed and loose motivation to do something different that you can be successful at.
I have been on the other end of this subject. I scored well when tested and tended to perform well against my peers technically, but I still did not blast out into great success. Where I had a problem for the longest time had nothing to do with my test scores. My problem had to do with my heart. I treated people badly. I had a bad attitude and I pretty much didn’t care what people thought or at least that was the attitude that I intentionally displayed. I have learned the hard way how attitude can affect success. The reasons for my attitude are a story for another day. Now I try to measure everything against God’s standard rather than my own. I am much more successful than ever as a result. I think that everyone has an opportunity for success in this country today no matter what their race is or how they scored on some test. You just have to get your head screwed on straight and put the failures behind you no matter what the failures or how they were dealt into your life.