🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️

Intelligence and intellectual capability!

Can you find a more controversial and debated topic? Especially how they do or don’t affect success of all types in life, from professional to personal, and simply being happy.

Yet we need to tackle these challenging topics if we are to progress.

In my new video, “Intelligence: Overrated, But Also Under Accounted For”, I tackle two key concepts that are often misunderstood, overlooked or confounded relating to intellect:

1️⃣ The statement that “intelligence is overrated”: a frequently heard comment with much truth to it, but which can be better defined as “there are often other factors than raw intellect that are more predictive of success at a certain task or activity”.

I also talk about the problematic perceptions that one must be a “genius” to be successful and have great impact in fields perceived as being intellectually intensive.

and

2️⃣ Intellectual Capability is Often Under Accounted For: while it’s true that intellect is much more rarely a gatekeeper for various careers and activities than it is perceived to be, ignoring it completely as a factor also comes with significant perils.

Just like any other capability or skill, you don’t want to compete with others purely in that area: you always want to bring your other unique strengths to bear to give yourself every advantage.

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🕒 Timestamps are as follows:

📌 (0:00) Introduction: Intellectual Capability
📌 (0:14) Concept 1: Intellect and Enablers & Barriers
📌 (0:25) Concept 2: Accounting for Intellectual Capability
📌 (0:38) Both Concepts are Misunderstood or Overlooked
📌 (0:56) Video Overview: Working Definition, Concepts
📌 (1:11) Tangible Aspects of Intellectual Capability
📌 (1:46) One Example: Ideation and Problem Solving
📌 (2:09) Hypothetical: Group With Similar Backgrounds
📌 (2:39) Equal Opportunity to Learn a New Domain
📌 (2:58) A Mostly Level Playing Field
📌 (3:07) Sidestepping Genetic Factors Completely
📌 (3:19) Variability Even Within That Group
📌 (4:26) Unpacking “Intelligence is Overrated”
📌 (4:58) A Better Version of “Intelligence is Overrated”
📌 (5:20) A Common Context Where This Phrase is Used
📌 (5:38) The Perception Problem Around Intelligence
📌 (6:34) Intellect is Often Under Accounted For
📌 (7:09) Example: Ideation and Grant Writing
📌 (7:38) Meeting Your Competition
📌 (8:29) Key Idea: “Direct” Competition Is Challenging
📌 (9:25) Differences in Output Can Be Huge!
📌 (9:42) Of Course, This Isn’t The Whole Picture!
📌 (9:57) Recognizing the Value of Non-Intellectual Factors
📌 (10:17) Grant Example: Other Potential Strengths
📌 (10:49) All Other Things Usually Aren’t Equal
📌 (11:01) Knowing and Cultivating Your Strengths
📌 (11:10) Corollary: Strong Intellects Focus On Other Areas
📌 (11:26) Summary: Two Key Concepts Relating to Intellect

Full Video Notes

This video is about two key concepts regarding intellectual capability that are sometimes misunderstood, and often mixed up, with resulting sub-optimal outcomes for people’s career planning and strategy.
The first is the general concept of intellectual capability, and perceptions around what it enables or stops you from doing.
The second is the concept of taking into account differences in intellectual capability in strategizing for your career, from day to day activities to long term plans.
The first concept does a lot of unnecessary damage, especially in terms of warping perceptions of young people around what careers they could prosper in, whilst the second concept is often overlooked, with equally bad outcomes for your career.
In the rest of this video, I’ll give a working definition for one example of intellectual capability, then run through the key details of these two concepts and what they mean for your career.

A Working Definition of Intellectual Capability

Defining and quantifying intelligence, or even deciding whether you should try to define intelligence, is a hugely problematic topic and one I’m going to sidestep entirely for this video.
Instead, I’m going to focus on a working definition of intellectual capability, which focuses on the much easier to define tangible outputs and capabilities of a person for an intellectually-driven task, which goes something like this.
For many types of careers, not just academic ones, a substantial part of the job will involve using your brain to solve challenging problems by creating new ideas for solutions. To use research as an example, you may need to come up with a bunch of ideas for how to solve a problem.
To remove the effects of privilege, socio-economic status and other confounding factors, imagine a hypothetical scenario where a bunch of researchers from similar backgrounds. They’ve been given a task to learn about a new topic domain which they are all equally unfamiliar with. Their job is to come up with a bunch of ways to solve a challenging unsolved problem in that domain.
They’re all given plenty of time to learn about the domain, any differences in information absorption capability have been recognized and accounted for – perhaps some people are better reading-type learners, whilst others are auditory learners. Everyone’s on as level a playing field as possible – that is, apart from their core intellectual capability. How much of that is due or not to genetics is another controversial topic that I can’t do justice to and is still a subject of scientific study and debate.
When those people go to solve the challenge, there will be substantial variations in their capability to do so. Some will be much faster than others. Some will be far more prolific in generating large numbers of fully feasible potential solutions to investigate. Some will be able to go much deeper into the problem, perceiving and understanding subtle nuances and secondary and tertiary components of the problem. Some will be able to simultaneously consider and reconcile a larger number of conflicting ideas or concepts than others. If you take the speed of working through the problem out of the equation, there will still be variation in how deep and thoroughly different people can explore the problem, no matter how long they’re given.
This is the particular working definition of intellectual capability I’m using this video.

Intelligence is Overrated

You will often hear the phrase “intelligence is overrated”, and there is a lot of truth to that statement, but it does need a little unpacking.
Most often, this statement is said in response to an example of someone widely regarded to be very bright or intelligent not being able to use that supposed intelligence to succeed at something, whether that is their job, their personal lives, or even just being happy.
A better version of this statement is that “intelligence is often not the crucial predictive factor for success at something, because there are often, perhaps usually, other personal characteristics or considerations that have more impact on the outcome than pure intellect”.
A simple and frequently encountered example of this would be a person with great technical intellectual capability but who lacks emotional intelligence struggling to function in a challenging team environment.
Another problematic issue with putting intelligence up on a pedestal is the perception that you need to be a so-called genius to have a successful career and make great contributions in some fields that are regarded as being intellectually-intensive. This perception does a lot of damage, especially early on when young people are thinking about the types of things they might want to do when they are older. While it’s true that there are very specific roles where many people, no matter how much training and support they get, will struggle intellectually, far too many career options are still discarded because of an incorrect perception of what’s required intellectually to be successful in that career, and how important intellect is versus other characteristics.

Intelligence is Under Accounted For

The companion concept to intelligence being over-rated is that intellectual capability is often under accounted for. This concept is often overlooked, and frequently confounded with the first concept.
Differences in intellectual capability are rarely a showstopper in terms of being able to pursue the career you want, but, and this is a big but, they absolutely should be accounted for if you want to get the best outcome in your career.
To instantiate this with a concrete example, think about the task of grant or proposal writing in academia. This is a key part of most academic and more senior researcher roles, which consumes a lot of your time and energy. You will often hear academics talk about spending significant time over months or even years writing a proposal.
If you work in a field like robotics, computer vision, or machine learning, you will encounter researchers who have dozens of amazing ideas for new research projects at any one time, and who are able to beautifully articulate these ideas and write wonderfully compelling proposals, sometimes in a ridiculously short period of time. Some of this is no doubt due to different circumstances: maybe that academic had a particularly good set of supervisors who trained them well, and has been afforded more time to think about research. But some of those differences are also due to inherent intellectual capability as pertains to that particular set of tasks.
Now here are the two key points. The first is that most things, for better or for worse, are inherently competitive: in academia and indeed most professions, you are competing with others to get jobs, promotions, and to get funding, in what are very competitive schemes with low success rates.
The second, most important point is this: if you are competing against some of these individuals, in raw idea generation and exposition in grant proposals, you will get smashed. If they have ten times as many ideas as you, if their ideas are as good or better than yours, and they’re ten times as fast as you at writing and submitting these proposals, you will break yourself trying to compete directly. You may think those numbers are exaggerations but they are very much real: there are individuals who will be an order of magnitude more prolific in idea generation, and in putting those ideas eloquently to paper, so to speak.
Now that sounds like a pretty dire situation right, but at the same time you’re thinking to yourself that you probably know people of all different intellectual backgrounds and capabilities who do quite well in their job.
And that comes down to the key takeaway, which is related to the first concept in this video: raw intellectual capability is just one piece of the puzzle, and other factors can more than compensate for any differences.
To continue the grant submission example: you will have other strengths that you can bring to bear. They could be your ability to talk to and understand the needs of industry partners, gaining deep insights into real-world problems that can give your proposals a unique edge. You may have more life experience that you can bring to bear, by better situating the proposal in terms of the larger societal benefit. The key here is that beyond intellect, all other things are almost never equal, and you can leverage those other things you’re particularly strong at.
This concept is of course related to the broader one of knowing and cultivating your strengths.
There’s a corollary here too: if you are really brilliant in the core technical area of your career, one of the best investments you can make is in developing those other capabilities, which can often be weak spots for you.
So in summary: I’ve covered two key concepts about intellect. The first is that it is frequently over-rated, because other considerations are often more important, and because it is much more rarely the limiting factor for various careers and opportunities than it is perceived to be. The second concept was that while intellectual capability differences are not the show stopper they’re often portrayed as, they most definitely should be accounted for, in planning how you do things and how you craft your value propositions and career.