People with unusually high IQ, why are you still unsuccessful?
There is a point that is missed here, even if some points seem familiar. Maybe I&#x27;m an outlier, but: I turn out to have top half-percentile IQ (as I&#x27;m sure many on HN do), which is not the disconnected genius level that the author describes, but still about two standard deviations above the average. I&#x27;m only moderately successful career-wise -- a &quot;follower&quot; in the author&#x27;s words. Excellent grades from education. In professional life, not destitute and getting a decent amount of professional respect, but nothing outside of what you&#x27;ll expect to find in a decent-sized company. Salary is likewise. No ambitions of being a boss. I can take technical leadership roles temporarily, if it feels like a good fit, and that&#x27;s great fun. I&#x27;ll get bored after a while, and it takes a lot of energy &amp; focus to do well.<p>The biggest reason I can identify for this moderate and not spectacular level of success, is that I just don&#x27;t care so much about being super successful in my career. I also crucially lack the <i>energy</i> and <i>drive</i> that some of super-successul people the author describes obviously has. Even if I was born in a millionaire family with excellent connections to power and prestige, I doubt I would have been an entrepeneur or a successful academic.<p>The vast majority of things you&#x27;ll do in those professions just seem so boring and tedious. Elon Musk&#x27;s 100 hour workweeks, all year every year, seems like hell. Ditto for most successful entrepeneurs I&#x27;m aware of. Even if they lead fascinating, cutting-edge technology development. I&#x27;d much rather spend most of my time learning new things, satisfying my curiosity, playing computer games or learning new skills. As well as spending time with the people I love, which means I deliberately choose to not work 50 hours per week in a high-demand software-related job far from home. I&#x27;m certain in a different life I could move to California and do much better, but there&#x27;s so much in my life today I don&#x27;t want to sacrifice to do that.<p>I&#x27;ve just never found a subject that interests me enough (money-earning <i>or</i> otherwise) to dedicate my full effort to it. There&#x27;s certainly something to the author&#x27;s points of being surrounded by like-minded people, but there&#x27;s three or four of them near my hometown that I&#x27;ve met through university. We have fun and get along well, but we won&#x27;t change the world. Maybe that&#x27;s a waste. My goal in life is to be happy, not earn power and prestige. Sometimes I wish I had the drive and interest to do cutting-edge research and development in a new field, but when I visualize that, it seems like a lifestyle that will require cutting out so much of what I currently love.<p>It&#x27;s probably not possible in the human condition to be truly happy, but I&#x27;m certain I&#x27;d be more unhappy if I spent all my time doing ambitious things that I don&#x27;t have an innate drive for.<p>Maybe I could work super hard five years and then retire, but I&#x27;ll most likely be able to retire early anyway. Anything can happen in those five years. It&#x27;s not worth the risk.