3 Ways Smart People Make Themselves Unhappy and Unsuccessful
One of the best ways to know what secret anxieties plague people is to look at what they click on online. And as someone who writes for the internet for a living, I can tell you few topics drive more clicks than articles that promise to “make you smarter.” People really, really worry whether they’re intelligent enough to accomplish the things they want to accomplish.
If you want to be a theoretical physicist, that makes sense. Even Jeff Bezos claims to not be smart enough to cut it in physics (becoming one of the world’s richest people was his fall back plan). But if your aim in life is to be happy and successful in any other career than esoteric academia, then exceptional intelligence is far from the be-all and end-all. In fact, in plenty of instances, it can hold you back.
Intelligence guarantees neither happiness nor success.
“In general… there is no correlation between general intelligence and life satisfaction at the individual level,” reports Harvard professor and happiness expert Arthur Brooks in a recent Atlantic column. Many of us have met tremendously gifted individuals — as well as individuals with remarkably successful careers — who are clearly miserable.
