Why do intelligent and smart people fail?
What is the difference between smart and intelligent people?. Intelligence has more to do with our genetics and inborn abilities whereas smartness is generally a skill which can be built on top of intelligence. Or, put it more succinctly:
If we imagine intelligence as the capacity of our brain, smartness would be the art of filling it. In other words, maybe your room ( intelligence) isn’t really big but you are very good in filling it and using it most effectively ( smartness).
However smart and intelligent a person might be, he/she is still prone to fail.
According to In Search of Human Mind (by Robert Sternberg), intelligent people fail because of one or few of the reasons below:
- Lack of motivation
- Lack of impulse control
- Lack of perseverance
- Using wrong abilities
- Inability to translate thought into action
- Lack of product orientation
- Inability to complete tasks
- Failure to initiate
- Fear of failure
- Procrastination
- Misattribution of blame
- Excessive self-pity
- Excessive dependency
- Wallowing in personal difficulties
- Distraction and lack of concentration
- Spreading oneself too thin or too thick
- Inability to delay gratification
- Inability to see the forest for the trees
- Lack of balance between critical, analytical thinking and creative, synthetic thinking
- Too little or too much self-confidence
Smart people have a different set of potential reasons directly or indirectly overlapping with the reasons of failure for intelligent:
- Their goals are lot bigger
- What makes them smart makes them ineffective competitors
- They falsely mistake most people as being more like them than they are
- Thinking by itself is not a success
- They require different kinds of stimulation
What other reasons can you think of that make intelligent and smart people fail?
The jealousy and enmity of others
Pasta Salad
March 9, 2012 at 3:19 am
the know-it-all sydrome that pevents them from discovering the strengths of delegation and working in a team
ijeoma
April 12, 2012 at 4:02 pm