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At first glance, people with mental abilities live much easier and more interesting than the rest. But there is another side to the coin, warns emotional intelligence expert Travis Bradberry.
Smart people often make the dumbest mistakes when ordinary common sense is required to solve a problem. Due to their extraordinary intelligence, they manage to confuse simple situations so much that it is unclear whether to laugh or cry. As Voltaire said: “Not everyone sees the obvious.”
Scholars have pondered this contradiction for decades. Why rational thinking is rarely friends with the intellect was one of the first to understand Yale School of Management professor Shane Frederick.
In the course of his experiments, Frederick suggested solving simple problems like this one: “A bat and a ball cost one dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much is the ball worth? He found that some blurted out “dime” outright, in full confidence that they were not mistaken.
You probably know that the correct answer is “five cents” (and a bit, respectively, is 1 dollar 5 cents). If in doubt, find the answer by solving an equation like x=y+1. Most likely, you are wondering how the intelligence of those who hastily gave the wrong decision was.
The stupider the mistake, the harder it is for a smart person to accept that he made it.
Psychologists from James Madison University also became interested. So they handed out similar logic tests to hundreds of people, and then compared the accuracy of the answers with their level of intelligence. Oddly enough, the researchers found that the smartest people were mostly wrong because they were psychologically incapable of solving mindfulness problems.
Intellectuals are more likely to make stupid mistakes because there are blind spots in their logic. These spots arise because smart people overestimate their ability to reason rationally. That is, they are so accustomed to always being right and giving lightning-fast answers that they don’t even understand where they “blundered”.
But complete ignoramuses coped with the problem of the bat and the ball perfectly. Isn’t it a shame that more than half of the students at Harvard, Princeton, and MIT got the same question wrong?
The smartest people don’t want to admit their own mistakes. Regardless of the level of intelligence, we are all subject to the so-called “blind spot effect”. In other words, we easily notice other people’s mistakes and refuse to see our own.
The more stupid the mistake, the more difficult it is for a smart person to accept that he made it. While no one spends all day working on tricky puzzles like the bat-and-ball test, they involve the same parts of the brain that are used in everyday thinking. Thus, the tendency to do stupid things haunts talented people at work as well.
Consider the most common cases when smart people manage to do themselves a disservice.
1. Talented people are overconfident.
Years of praise lead to the fact that they begin to unconditionally believe in their outstanding abilities. When there are so many achievements that pleasantly tickle the ego, it is natural to expect that everything will always work out.
However, this is a dangerous expectation. Talented people often do not admit that they need help, and if they do, they doubt that anyone can provide it.
2. They push people too hard.
Talented people become “super efficient” because they get things done easily.
They simply don’t understand how hard others have to work to achieve the same results, and therefore they put too much pressure on people. They set an exorbitantly high bar, and when colleagues do not meet the deadline or give not the best result, they consider that they are simply lazy. Then they push even harder and miss the opportunity to help others achieve their goals.
3. They always have to be right
It is not easy for any of us to put up with our own mistakes. Talented people have it even harder, because they are so used to always being on top that it has become part of their identity. They take their slightest mistake as a personal insult, and being right as a matter of course.
4. They have low emotional intelligence
Although intelligence quotient (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ) are fundamentally different concepts (on average, talented individuals have the same EQ as everyone else), when a gifted person has a weak EQ, it is doubly offensive.
For people with high IQs and low EQs, the world is a meritocracy, a system ruled by an educated elite. Achievements are everything, people and emotions are nothing. This is simply ridiculous, because the TalentSmart poll, which was attended by a million people, including geniuses, showed that it is people with the highest EQ who achieve great success.
5. They give up at the first failure.
If you even occasionally watch sporting events, then you have probably seen the shocked faces of losing athletes, from whom everyone expected victory. Talented people easily fall into the same trap and see failure as the end of the world, because the constant success has created inflated expectations within them.
Those who have to work hard for every achievement have made more than one attempt and learned to deal with failure. They accept them calmly, because they know that these are “steps” on the ladder to success.
6. They lack perseverance
When everything turns out at the snap of a finger, people begin to regard laborious work as torture.
If talented individuals cannot handle something without much effort, they get frustrated and embarrassed. And so they come to a false conclusion: since I failed something, something is wrong with me. As a result, they give up halfway through and take on a task that reinforces their sense of worth. Often they don’t even try to develop the tenacity needed to get to the next level.
7. They are used to multitasking
Talented people think much faster than others, which makes them impatient. They love to take on everything at once, so that there is no downtime. They develop vigorous activity, and then it seems that multitasking is really useful, because a person has more time.
However, a Stanford University study showed the opposite. First, multitasking reduces productivity. Secondly, people who often take on several tasks at the same time and think that they are good at it, in fact, perform much worse than those who prefer to do everything in turn.
8. They don’t take advice or comments.
Talented people tend to underestimate other people’s opinions – they don’t believe that someone else is competent enough to give them useful advice. This not only prevents them from growing and improving the quality of their work, but also destroys relationships – both professional and personal.
Although it may seem that the purpose of this article is to shame talented people, it is not. Sometimes priceless gifts of fate, including outstanding intelligence, come with tests. And if someone does not want to treat himself objectively, he simply exchanges his talent for trifles. And it’s certainly not smart at all.
About the author: Travis Bradberry, co-author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0.