Title should be: How people who think they are smart sabotage their success.
This kind of article always make me uncomfortable because I feel smartness/cleverness/intelligence does not seem to be objective enough a quality to lead to such analysis. And some people may identify with such patterns and declare themselves as "too smart" and not try harder, believing the problem is from the other side of the table.
Which we all know isn’t true. The lack of social mobility in the US has nothing to do with lack of ability or skills. Power and wealth are to concentrated and “success” is more dependent on access to those than being smart, having abilities or skills.
And what should you call it when people are less successful than they could be, and can't see that the cause is their counterproductive habits and apparent lack of self-awareness? - because 'smart' isn't the first word that springs to my mind.
There's "smart" in the sense of "general mental ability" (ie, skill in cognitive tasks), which is usually what the word is used colloquially to mean, and then there's "smart" in the sense of "making the optimal choices for long term happiness and success", which, being correlated with the first definition is often conflated.
Now, sometimes these definitions come apart, ie, people who are "smart" in the first sense fail to be "smart" in the second sense. That doesn't mean the first definition is inherently meaningless. In fact, g factor ("IQ"), the psychometric concept that maps most closely to that first definition is extremely well studied, and well established as coherent and measurable.
Why these two attributes come apart in some people is an interesting question, because they're usually so correlated, and that's what the article is in a sense about.