Monday morning, December 1st. Watching another parent brag about their kid's IQ score while that kid can't focus on homework for ten minutes. The wrong variable is being optimized.

The Intelligence Worship

Here's the modern script:

Intelligence is what matters most. Get your kid into gifted programs. Test their IQ. Celebrate being smart. Intelligence determines who succeeds. Smart people become successful. The world rewards the intelligent.

The promise: If you're smart enough, everything else follows. Intelligence is the golden ticket. Success is just a matter of having sufficient cognitive horsepower.

The reality: Some of the smartest people you know are underachieving. Some of the most successful people you know are not particularly intelligent. The correlation exists but it's weaker than our cultural narrative suggests.

Thesis: Intelligence is dramatically overrated as a predictor of achievement. We've built educational systems, hiring practices, and cultural values around a variable that matters far less than we pretend. Meanwhile, traits that predict success much more reliably—conscientiousness, emotional regulation, frustration tolerance, ability to endure boredom—receive almost no attention or cultivation. We're optimizing for the wrong thing, and it's costing individuals and society enormously.

What Intelligence Actually Predicts

Before examining why intelligence is overrated, let's establish what it actually does:

Intelligence Predicts... Some Things, Weakly

Research consensus: IQ correlates with various life outcomes at roughly r=0.3-0.4. That sounds significant until you understand what it means.

R=0.3 means: Intelligence explains about 9% of the variance in outcomes. That means 91% of the variance is explained by other factors. Intelligence is a factor, just not the dominant factor our culture treats it as.

What this looks like practically:

  • The smartest person in your high school class: might be successful, might be struggling, might be average
  • The person who became most successful from your high school: probably not the smartest
  • The correlation exists but it's swamped by other variables

We act like intelligence explains 80% of outcomes. It explains closer to 10%. This gap between perception and reality drives massive misallocation of effort.

What Intelligence Doesn't Predict Well

Research shows surprisingly weak correlations between IQ and:

Life satisfaction: r≈0.1-0.2. Being smart doesn't make you happy. Sometimes the reverse—higher intelligence correlates with higher rates of anxiety and overthinking.

Income (beyond certain threshold): Once you're above minimum competence for a field, intelligence adds little. The correlation between IQ and income is strongest at low levels (intelligence helps you get basic credentials) and weakens dramatically at higher levels.

Relationship success: Essentially zero correlation. Being smart doesn't make you better at relationships, might make you worse (overthinking, intellectualizing emotions, difficulty being present).

Mental health: Smart people have similar or higher rates of mental health issues. Intelligence doesn't protect against depression, anxiety, addiction.

Wisdom: Intelligent people are not noticeably wiser. They're better at rationalization, which can make them worse at wisdom (better at defending stupid positions).

The uncomfortable truth: Intelligence is most useful for academic tasks and certain specific professions. For most of what makes life good or successful, it barely matters.

What Actually Predicts Success

Here's what the research shows matters more:

Conscientiousness: The Unsexy Winner

Big Five personality research: Conscientiousness predicts job performance at r=0.4-0.5, better than intelligence for most jobs. It predicts health outcomes, longevity, relationship stability, financial success.

What conscientiousness means:

  • Doing what you said you'd do
  • Showing up consistently
  • Following through even when you don't feel like it
  • Maintaining effort over time
  • Delaying gratification
  • Being organized enough to track commitments

This is boring. It's not sexy. Can't brag about your conscientiousness score. Doesn't make you feel special. Just... works.

Why it predicts success better than intelligence:

Success in most domains requires sustained effort over time. Writing a book: intelligence helps with prose quality, but conscientiousness determines whether you actually write it. Building a business: intelligence helps with strategy, but conscientiousness determines whether you execute consistently. Maintaining relationships: intelligence is nearly irrelevant, conscientiousness (showing up, following through, being reliable) is everything.

The smart-but-undisciplined person accomplishes less than the disciplined-but-average person. Every time. Intelligence gives you good ideas. Conscientiousness determines whether you implement them.

Emotional Regulation: The Invisible Skill

Emotional regulation: Ability to experience emotions without being controlled by them. Feel frustration without quitting. Feel anxiety without avoiding. Feel anger without destroying relationships.

This predicts:

  • Career success (ability to handle setbacks, criticism, stress)
  • Relationship success (ability to have conflicts without destroying things)
  • Mental health (ability to experience negative emotions without spiraling)
  • Achievement (ability to persist through difficulty)

Intelligence doesn't help here, might hurt: Smart people are often better at intellectualizing emotions, which can interfere with actually processing them. Better at constructing sophisticated rationalizations for avoidance.

The pattern:

  • Smart person with poor emotional regulation: achieves less, relationships suffer, high anxiety
  • Average person with strong emotional regulation: steady achievement, stable relationships, resilient

Emotional regulation is trainable but rarely taught. We spend 12 years teaching math. Almost zero time teaching how to handle frustration, process anxiety, sit with discomfort.

Frustration Tolerance: The Bottleneck

Most valuable tasks involve frustration: Writing involves staring at blank page. Coding involves bugs that make no sense. Research involves dead ends. Entrepreneurship involves constant rejection. Relationships involve conflict and repair.

The person who can tolerate frustration longer wins. Not because they're smarter. Because they stay in the game while others quit.

Intelligence can make frustration tolerance worse: Smart people often had school come easily. First time they hit something genuinely hard, they lack frustration tolerance. They interpret difficulty as "I'm not smart enough for this" rather than "this is the normal experience of learning."

Why frustration tolerance matters more than intelligence:

Complex achievements require navigating extended periods of confusion and frustration. Intelligence might let you understand faster once you break through. But frustration tolerance determines whether you stay long enough to break through.

The smart person who quits when frustrated accomplishes less than the average person who persists. Most people aren't failing because they're not smart enough. They're failing because they give up when things get hard.

Boredom Tolerance: The Multiplier

Most achievement requires extended periods of boring repetition:

  • Writing: mostly revision, editing, mundane sentence-level work
  • Programming: mostly debugging, incremental improvements, maintenance
  • Business: mostly operations, customer service, routine execution
  • Expertise: mostly deliberate practice of basics

Intelligence doesn't help with boredom, might hurt: Smart people get bored more easily. Need more novelty. Find repetition more aversive.

The person who can do boring work consistently beats the person who only works when interested. Success is mostly about showing up to do boring work, not about having brilliant insights.

Example: Writing a book.

  • Intelligence: helps with ideas, prose quality, structure (maybe 20% of the work)
  • Boredom tolerance: determines whether you sit down and write 500 words daily for a year (80% of the work)

The smart person who can't tolerate boredom never finishes. The average person who can sit with boring work publishes.

Why We Overrate Intelligence

If intelligence matters less than we think, why do we worship it?

Intelligence Is Legible and Measurable

IQ tests exist. You get a number. Schools can sort students by it. Companies can test for it. It's quantifiable.

Conscientiousness, emotional regulation, frustration tolerance: Much harder to measure. No simple test. Can't be reduced to single number.

We gravitate toward what's measurable. Even when what's measurable matters less than what's not. Intelligence is legible. Other traits are not. So we optimize for intelligence.

This is "streetlight effect": Looking for your keys under the streetlight because that's where the light is, not because that's where you dropped them.

Intelligence Feels Special

Being smart: Feels like an identity. Something you are, not just something you do. Makes you feel special, chosen, different.

Being conscientious: Feels like basic adulting. Not special. Anyone could be conscientious if they tried. (This isn't quite true, but it feels true.)

We prefer traits that feel innate and special: Intelligence fits this narrative. "I'm just smart" feels better than "I just work harder" or "I'm just more conscientious." One makes you special. The other makes you ordinary.

The cultural narrative supports this: Gifted programs, IQ testing, celebration of prodigies. We make intelligence an identity. We make conscientiousness a boring baseline expectation.

Intelligence Excuses Failure

Failure with high intelligence: "I was too smart for that conventional path. I was bored. The system wasn't designed for people like me."

Failure with low intelligence: "I wasn't smart enough." (Also an excuse, but less socially acceptable.)

Intelligence provides socially acceptable rationalizations for not achieving. Smart-but-undisciplined people can blame the system, boredom, lack of challenge. This feels better than "I lacked the conscientiousness to do boring work consistently."

The "gifted kid burnout" narrative: Smart kids who struggle as adults. The narrative: the system failed them, they were bored, they needed different challenges.

The reality: Often they never developed frustration tolerance or boredom tolerance because things came easily early on. Intelligence got them through school. Adult achievement requires persistence, emotional regulation, tolerating boredom. They never built those muscles.

Educational System Is Built Around Intelligence

Schools sort by intelligence: Gifted programs, advanced tracks, IQ testing. The message: intelligence is what matters.

Schools barely teach:

  • How to persist when frustrated
  • How to do boring work consistently
  • How to regulate emotions
  • How to delay gratification

These skills predict success better than intelligence, but schools don't teach them. Why? Because they're harder to measure. Harder to test. Harder to standardize.

The result: We produce smart people with weak conscientiousness, poor emotional regulation, low frustration tolerance. Then we're surprised they underachieve.

The Costs of Intelligence Worship

What are we losing by optimizing for the wrong variable?

Talent Misallocation

We identify "smart" kids early and invest heavily in their intelligence development. More advanced classes. Gifted programs. Acceleration. Enrichment.

We often neglect their character development. They never learn to handle frustration (things came easily). Never develop boredom tolerance (always given interesting challenges). Never build emotional regulation (praised for being smart, not for being resilient).

The result: Smart adults who can't execute. Brilliant ideas, poor implementation. High intelligence, low achievement.

Meanwhile: Average kids who develop conscientiousness, frustration tolerance, emotional regulation often outperform the "gifted" kids in the long run. But we invested less in them because they weren't "smart."

This is massive misallocation. We're investing in the 10% variable (intelligence) while neglecting the 40% variable (conscientiousness).

Wrong Self-Understanding

People who identify as "smart": Often overweight intelligence in their self-concept. "I'm smart, so things should come easily." When things get hard, they interpret it as "this isn't for me" rather than "this is the normal experience of growth."

This creates fragility. Your identity is built around something that doesn't actually determine success. When you fail despite being smart, it's identity-threatening.

Better self-understanding: "I'm conscientious. I can tolerate frustration. I can do boring work consistently." This predicts success better and creates antifragile identity (effort and persistence are under your control; intelligence is not).

Undervaluing Crucial Skills

Because we worship intelligence, we underinvest in developing:

  • Conscientiousness (dismissed as "just work harder")
  • Emotional regulation (barely discussed in education)
  • Frustration tolerance (seen as weakness if you struggle)
  • Boredom tolerance (seen as lack of passion or engagement)

These skills are trainable. You can develop better emotional regulation. You can build frustration tolerance. You can increase conscientiousness.

But we don't systematically teach them. Because they're not "smart." They're not special. They're just... effective.

The cost: People with mediocre character trying to succeed on intelligence alone. It doesn't work. But they don't know what's missing.

Credentialism Over Competence

Intelligence is credentialed: Degrees from prestigious universities, certifications, test scores. Easy to signal.

Conscientiousness, emotional regulation, frustration tolerance: Hard to credential. You have to demonstrate them over time through actual behavior.

Hiring practices optimize for credentials: Which means optimizing for intelligence proxies while barely measuring the traits that actually predict performance.

The result: Hiring smart people who can't execute. Passing over conscientious people who would outperform.

What to Do Instead

If intelligence is overrated, what should we optimize for?

Cultivate Conscientiousness

This is trainable: Start with small commitments. Keep them. Gradually increase difficulty. Build the muscle of following through even when you don't feel like it.

Practical steps:

  • Make small commitments to yourself, keep them religiously (this builds self-trust)
  • Use implementation intentions ("when X happens, I'll do Y")
  • Track completion, not just intention
  • Start smaller than you think necessary (the point is consistency, not intensity)

For children: Don't just praise intelligence ("you're so smart"). Praise follow-through, persistence, completion. Make conscientiousness the valued trait.

This matters more than boosting IQ. You can't significantly increase intelligence. You can dramatically increase conscientiousness.

Build Frustration Tolerance

Deliberate practice: Engage with tasks that frustrate you. Stay slightly longer than comfortable. Gradually increase duration.

The growth happens in the discomfort. Not in the easy parts. Frustration is the signal you're at your edge. Learning to stay there is the skill.

For children: Don't rescue them from every frustration. Let them struggle. Support them while they struggle, but don't remove the struggle. Frustration tolerance is built by experiencing frustration and learning you can handle it.

Reframe frustration: Not as "I'm not smart enough" but as "I'm at my current edge." Frustration means you're growing, not that you're inadequate.

Develop Emotional Regulation

Basic skill: Notice emotions without being controlled by them. "I'm feeling anxious" instead of "I am anxious." The emotion is something you're experiencing, not something you are.

Practice: When you feel strong emotions, pause before reacting. Notice the physiological sensations. Name the emotion. Choose response instead of reacting automatically.

This is trainable: Meditation helps. Therapy helps. Deliberate practice helps. You can get dramatically better at this.

For children: Help them name emotions. Validate emotions while setting boundaries on behavior. "It's okay to feel angry. It's not okay to hit." Teach that emotions are temporary experiences, not commands.

Increase Boredom Tolerance

Practice doing boring things: Without distraction. Without making them interesting. Just do boring work because it needs doing.

Modern problem: Constant stimulation. Every moment filled. Never bored. This atrophies boredom tolerance.

Deliberate practice: Do boring tasks without trying to make them interesting. Sit with boredom. Notice it's not actually dangerous or intolerable. Just... boring.

For children: Don't entertain them constantly. Let them be bored sometimes. Boredom is not an emergency. Learning to tolerate it is valuable.

Stop Optimizing for Intelligence

For yourself: Stop identifying primarily as "smart." Start identifying as conscientious, persistent, emotionally regulated. These predict success better and are under your control.

For children: Stop obsessing over gifted programs and IQ scores. Start obsessing over character development, persistence, emotional regulation, frustration tolerance.

In hiring: Stop over-weighting credentials (intelligence proxies). Start actually measuring conscientiousness, frustration tolerance, emotional regulation. These predict performance better.

In education: Stop tracking primarily by intelligence. Start teaching and measuring character traits that actually predict success.

The December Truth

Here's what we get wrong about intelligence:

Intelligence is real and measurable. But it explains ~10% of variance in outcomes, not 80%. We've built our entire educational and cultural system around a minor variable while ignoring the major ones.

The traits that actually predict success—conscientiousness, emotional regulation, frustration tolerance, boredom tolerance—are less legible but more important. They're also more trainable. You can't significantly boost IQ, but you can dramatically improve these other traits.

We worship intelligence because it's measurable and makes us feel special. Not because it actually determines success. This is costly misallocation of effort and attention.

Smart people often underachieve because they never developed the character traits that success requires. Things came easily due to intelligence, so they never built frustration tolerance, boredom tolerance, or emotional regulation. Adult achievement requires these traits. Intelligence alone doesn't cut it.

Average people with strong character traits often outperform smart people with weak character. This surprises people who believe the intelligence narrative, but it's clearly visible once you start looking for it.

Here's what to actually do:

Stop worshiping intelligence. It matters, just much less than we pretend. Treat it as one factor among many, not the dominant factor.

Build conscientiousness. Make commitments to yourself and keep them. Start small. Build the muscle of following through regardless of how you feel. This predicts success better than intelligence.

Develop frustration tolerance. Practice staying with difficulty slightly longer than comfortable. Reframe frustration as growth signal, not inadequacy signal. The person who can stay frustrated longer wins.

Increase boredom tolerance. Practice doing boring work without making it interesting. Tolerate boredom. Most achievement requires sustained boring effort, not constant excitement.

Improve emotional regulation. Learn to experience emotions without being controlled by them. Feel frustration without quitting. Feel anxiety without avoiding. This enables persistence through difficulty.

Teach these traits to children. Stop obsessing over gifted programs. Start obsessing over character development. Praise follow-through, not intelligence. Let kids struggle and build frustration tolerance. Don't entertain them constantly—let them develop boredom tolerance.

Redesign systems around the right variables. Hiring, education, credentialing—all currently optimize for intelligence proxies. Should optimize for traits that actually predict performance: conscientiousness, emotional regulation, frustration tolerance.

Understand your own bottleneck. For most people, it's not intelligence. It's lack of follow-through, poor frustration tolerance, inability to do boring work consistently, or weak emotional regulation. These are fixable. Intelligence is not.

The uncomfortable truth: We've spent decades optimizing for intelligence because it's measurable and makes us feel special, not because it actually drives success. Meanwhile, the traits that genuinely predict achievement receive almost no systematic attention or development.

The smart person who can't persist accomplishes less than the average person who can tolerate boredom and frustration. This is visible everywhere once you start looking. The brilliant friend who never finishes anything. The average colleague who consistently ships. The gifted kid who burned out. The steady performer who built a career.

Intelligence is a multiplier on execution. But without execution, the multiplier acts on zero. Conscientiousness, frustration tolerance, boredom tolerance, emotional regulation—these determine whether you execute. Intelligence just determines how elegant the execution might be.

We're optimizing for elegance while neglecting execution. This is backwards.

The real edge: Not being smarter. Being more conscientious. More persistent. Better at tolerating frustration and boredom. Better at emotional regulation. These traits predict success better, are more trainable, and are dramatically undervalued.

Stop trying to be smarter. Start trying to be more conscientious, more emotionally regulated, more tolerant of frustration and boredom. This actually works.

And on this Monday morning, as we start December, that's worth remembering: Intelligence is the wrong variable. Character is what actually matters. And character, unlike intelligence, can be built.

Build character. The intelligence will take care of itself.

The intelligence illusion: We worship intelligence—IQ scores, gifted programs, being "the smart one." But intelligence might be most overrated trait in human achievement. Correlation between intelligence and life outcomes is weaker than most people think. Meanwhile, traits we barely discuss—conscientiousness, emotional regulation, tolerance for boredom—predict success far better. We've built entire educational and cultural system around optimizing for wrong variable. Thesis: Intelligence is dramatically overrated as predictor of achievement. We've built educational systems, hiring practices, and cultural values around variable that matters far less than we pretend. Traits that predict success much more reliably—conscientiousness, emotional regulation, frustration tolerance, ability to endure boredom—receive almost no attention or cultivation. We're optimizing for wrong thing, costing individuals and society enormously. What intelligence actually predicts: IQ correlates with life outcomes at r=0.3-0.4, means intelligence explains about 9% of variance in outcomes, 91% explained by other factors. Intelligence is factor, just not dominant factor our culture treats it as. What intelligence doesn't predict well: life satisfaction (r≈0.1-0.2), income beyond certain threshold, relationship success (essentially zero correlation), mental health, wisdom. Intelligence most useful for academic tasks and certain specific professions. For most of what makes life good or successful, it barely matters. What actually predicts success: Conscientiousness (predicts job performance at r=0.4-0.5, better than intelligence for most jobs, predicts health outcomes, longevity, relationship stability, financial success—means doing what you said you'd do, showing up consistently, following through, maintaining effort over time, delaying gratification, being organized); Emotional regulation (ability to experience emotions without being controlled by them, predicts career success, relationship success, mental health, achievement, intelligence doesn't help here might hurt); Frustration tolerance (most valuable tasks involve frustration, person who can tolerate frustration longer wins, intelligence can make this worse); Boredom tolerance (most achievement requires extended periods of boring repetition, intelligence doesn't help might hurt, person who can do boring work consistently beats person who only works when interested). Why we overrate intelligence: it's legible and measurable (IQ tests exist, get a number, quantifiable, while other traits much harder to measure); feels special (being smart feels like identity, makes you feel special, conscientiousness feels like basic adulting); excuses failure (provides socially acceptable rationalizations for not achieving); educational system is built around it (schools sort by intelligence, barely teach persistence, emotional regulation, tolerating boredom—these skills predict success better but schools don't teach them). Costs of intelligence worship: talent misallocation (invest in 10% variable intelligence while neglecting 40% variable conscientiousness); wrong self-understanding (identity built around something that doesn't determine success creates fragility); undervaluing crucial skills (underinvest in developing trainable skills that actually predict success); credentialism over competence (hiring optimizes for intelligence proxies while barely measuring traits that predict performance). What to do instead: cultivate conscientiousness (trainable—make small commitments and keep them, praise follow-through not intelligence); build frustration tolerance (engage with tasks that frustrate you, stay slightly longer than comfortable, let children struggle); develop emotional regulation (notice emotions without being controlled by them, trainable through practice); increase boredom tolerance (practice doing boring things without distraction, let children be bored sometimes); stop optimizing for intelligence (stop identifying primarily as smart, stop obsessing over gifted programs and IQ scores, start measuring character traits in hiring and education). Intelligence is real and measurable but explains ~10% of variance not 80%. Traits that actually predict success are less legible but more important and more trainable. We worship intelligence because it's measurable and makes us feel special, not because it determines success. Smart people often underachieve because they never developed character traits success requires. Average people with strong character often outperform smart people with weak character. Intelligence is multiplier on execution, but without execution multiplier acts on zero. Conscientiousness, frustration tolerance, boredom tolerance, emotional regulation determine whether you execute. Real edge: not being smarter, being more conscientious, persistent, better at tolerating frustration and boredom, better at emotional regulation. Character can be built, intelligence cannot be significantly increased. Build character.

Today's Sketch

Dec 1, 2025