How to Think Like a Genius 21-Fog
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Rick Rosner)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Jacobsen: There’s other ones such as “if you’re so smart, why can’t you hold down a job. Why are you lost in the clouds, in the fog?” Any thoughts?
Rosner: Geniuses are stereotypically absent-minded, lost in thought. Perhaps, not well-adapted for professional success and probably looking at it in terms of IQ is always a bad idea. There’s probably some optimum IQ. In terms of job getting and keeping, optimum as the highest possible IQ is probably well-below that like 140 or somebody, that person. 140, 145, 150, be able to acquire good professional skills and would be a good job candidate just on average run into not many more problems on the job than anyone else.
As you go higher, genius is made or supergenius is made, and they follow their own obsessions, might be a little Aspergery, and might not have the best manners. There’s an optimum IQ for succeeding at work. There are people at work at all different levels of IQ. We have a range of characteristics and abilities to sort of succeed at work. somebody who considers herself or himself a supergenius might be less or more eccentric or might be less willing to put with all of the BS that goes along with holding down a job. Subsuming your own interest to those of a business, or an academic enterprise.
The problems that somebody smart may have in keeping a job probably have more in common with problems other people have with jobs than not. There might be some unique, not unique, but some tendencies that are counterproductive at work that are more common among geniuses or purported geniuses. But I guess that those unique-ish problems are less common than the problems that everyone has.
Particularly since we will continue to move into the area of artisanal work, where jobs involving drudgery will continue to robotized and leaving jobs that require thought and creativity. So, the idea that geniuses are absent-minded and can’t hold down a job is probably mostly BS. With the more reasonable view being that geniuses have the same problems in life that everyone else does.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 