Why do high IQ people stagnate in their careers? Emotional intelligence | Hacker News Reader

Why do high IQ people stagnate in their careers? Emotional intelligence

bigthink.com

37 pointsppjim14 comments

It's called popularity (the same thing we all dealt with in high school). Those who are popular can do no wrong. Those who are unpopular can do no right. Popularity is also a double-edged sword, as can be seen recently in heroes who have fallen from grace, and suddenly everyone knows there was always something wrong with them.

And the bullying still continues. We like to think that high school was just a phase, but it's not.

This is one reason to start your own company. When you’re the boss, you can stop worrying about popularity or create a culture that re-defines popular.

My income trippled once I understood this and actively pursued improving my emotional intelligence.

> As Goleman explained in his interview, for any given role, there will be an IQ floor. If you become a professional software engineer, you will likely have an above average IQ. Otherwise, you won’t have developed the skills and expertise necessary to get the job in the first place.

> However, the same can be said of all the other engineers you work with. Intelligence will no longer be the factor that sets you apart.

Having that IQ requirement allows a person to hold those careers. To people outside those careers success is defined as holding that position for a period of time. Kind of like a musician playing a song or chef cooking some food. The performer(s) will have a much stronger (and likely harsher) opinion of their performance than their audience. So in a sense merely having that IQ, to an outside observer, is a determiner of success.

I stopped at Neil… it’s not even the same championship.

I'm not familiar with Neil dGT. I know how is kind of a celebrity.

Is he really considered to be among geniuses like Einstein?

He is absolutely not considered a genius and it’s extremely damning to this article to include him in this list. He’s one of those people who knows a good amount about one topic and then waxed eloquently wrong bullshit about every other topic under the sun while peddling to the internet for fame. His day is long past at this point especially IMO after he was deeply involved in a kickstarter scam.

This article kicked its own bucket in the first two sentences. What a joke.

I'd say not.

To the best of my knowledge, as an Australian loosely associated with the SKA project, fireball spotting, geophysics for astrophysics (ie. ground signal signatures to be subtracted from ground astro sensors), I'm not particularly aware of anything of note that he has done in the scientific side of the astro fields.

As I understand it he went straight from thesis research to being a spokesmodel for the Hayden Planetarium, then to directing site expansion and public outreach.

He's done good work interfacing to the USofA public with some minor recognition outside the US and is a known science educator.

But he's no (say) David Blair .. and David's no household name nor super high end genius (albeit pretty damn smart)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Blair_(physicist)

> Of the 21 competencies the researchers identified for top performers, 18 were related to emotional intelligence. The remaining ones were analytic skills, conceptual thinking, and technical expertise.

I do see this in the wild. Coincidentally those three other skills are the ones I hone and find lacking in depth. I may be a bit rough around the edges in EQ but have my heart in the right place wanting success for the project and everyone. Bringing depth to those other skills is what distinguishes me, and makes me complementary to those who have the 18 skills at my level.

So I'm applying the same logic about engineers having an IQ floor in the opposite sense. Those who get to a certain level have the 18 EQ skills and may be missing the 3 not well correlated, which I can fill in depth. I can work on bringing my EQ up to the floor level but I don't intend to optimize for it.

There's an assumption here that people agree on a direction to move a career, or that they see a need to move in it

The mismatch between personal interests and careers can be the elephant in the room to answer this question.

Because the whole IQ thing is bullshit and has been debunked over and over again.

And by the way, if such people with high iq where actually smart, they’d have figured out how not to stagnate in their careers.

"Emotional Intelligence" is the 2022-2023 buzz word.

More like 2012-13

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