Without empathy and persistence, high IQ is just a cheap parlor trick

By David McElroy · January 9, 2015

When I was young, I believed that intelligence was more important than anything else. I saw it as a trump card that allowed a person to come out on top every time in life. And I was arrogant enough to almost always believe I was the smartest person in the room.

Nobody ever quite told me that intelligence was more important than anything, but the subtle message I got was that a high IQ was a golden ticket for life. I was praised for being smart and clever, so I wanted to be seen as intelligent. It became my identity.

As an adult, I’ve done pretty well on IQ tests. Most of the ones I’ve taken put me between 155 and 165. That’s not enough to get me into any record books, but it’s nice.

I’ve always questioned myself, though. What if I weren’t as smart as people said I was? What if I were nothing but a fraud who took tests well? And what if I suddenly quit doing well on the tests? Would I still have the same value?

Over the past 10 or 15 years, I’ve realized something scary — at least for someone who came to identify with intelligence as much as I did. Being smart — having a high IQ — is fairly meaningless. It might make someone clever. It might mean a person can figure things out — and have quick insights about other things — that other people struggle with.

But high intelligence doesn’t make someone successful. It doesn’t make him a decent person. And it definitely doesn’t make him happy.

I put too much of my hope in smarts. For years, I didn’t put nearly enough faith into things such as hard work, persistence, love and empathy. And that’s one of the biggest reasons I haven’t done many of the great things I expected to accomplish in life.

I expected to be able to show up and be called great. I expected to be recognized for my genius and praised forever for my cleverness, insight and glib tongue.

I was mistaken.

I like being bright. I really do. I didn’t do anything to create it, of course, so it’s not something I can take pride it, any more than I can take pride in being blue-eyed or right-handed.

Being smarter or less intelligent is a bit like how tall you are. It’s a combination of genetics, environmental factors and luck. It might help me with certain games or puzzles. It might help me impress people sometimes. It might give me an advantage in figuring some things out before most people do, but it also comes with heavy disadvantages.

Believing you’re the smartest person in the room promotes arrogance. It promotes behavior that others see as condescending, even if you don’t mean it that way. Maybe worst of all, it makes you lazy, because you can do better than most others without ever trying.

So you stop trying.

There’s another downside. It’s very lonely, simply because it can contribute to making you feel very different — simply because you see things quickly that others don’t see very easily. Whether you’re objectively right about all of what you see or not isn’t the issue. You feel as though you have a kind of sight where others have blindness — and that makes you feel lonely among others. It’s sort of like seeing colors where other people see just monochrome. At least, that’s what it felt like to me.

I had to learn empathy as I got older. I had to try to learn not to be condescending. (I’m humiliated now when I look at some of the ways I treated people early in my adult life.) I had to learn that nobody cares what I scored on an IQ test. I had to learn that they only care what I can produce for them — what I can give them of value. Just showing up isn’t enough.

I used to be really impressed with high intelligence, but it seems almost trivial now. I still appreciate its possibilities, but I’m even more sensitive to its dangers. Most of all, though, I’m aware that it’s never enough.

I doubt I’ll ever take an IQ test again. There’s nothing wrong with them, as long as you understand that they’re a very, very narrow measure of something pretty nebulous and hard to define. But for me, the time is long past when I valued it so much for myself. I’m weary of my former worship of it. And there’s still a part of me that fears I’m a fraud — that I’m not as bright as everyone has always told me — and if that’s true, I don’t really want to know.

I still value smart people. I enjoy smart friends in the same way that an athletic person might enjoy having athletic friends. I hope to marry a very intelligent and curious woman. I hope to have very intelligent and curious children.

But I want my children to see intelligence as a basic, normal, accepted thing — which is worth nothing without their hard work and persistence. I want them to get their value not from being smart, but from the love, care and understanding they give to others.

High IQ is nice, but love, empathy, hard work and persistence will get you further in life — and they’ll make you a person much more worthy of being loved and appreciated by others.

Share on Social Networks

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts