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Since we are in the community, that takes IQ very seriously, don't you think that being energetic is also a major factor of success? For example, under the post about Elon Musk, the majority of the comment section is a discussion of how intelligent he is, but there is little talk about his mental stamina, which is the most interesting for me. I'm quite clever, maybe not extremely smart, but somewhere between 120-130 IQ and I cannot imagine myself having a business, because it requires preparedness for constant struggle and ability to withstand many hard blows. I can imagine myself in a cozy office job, and making decent number of money, but never in any executive position, where I have to talk to people all the time and constantly think about my company, while everybody wants to take me out.
Similarly, in every small town, there is a couple of business owners that enjoy higher standard of living than their neighbors and are often envied by the community. People with academic background like provincial doctors or teachers sometimes mock them as dim-witted and uncouth, but this is rarely the case. I think they are quite smart, maybe not very smart but at least around 120 IQ. They just possess different set of capabilities than people who like intellectual challenges.
George Cochran calls it moxie, Steve Malina writes on his blog about energetic aliens. It's interesting what determines these abilities from biological point of view. Is this higher dopamine levels? Extreme emotional stability? Very efficient brain? All of these factors?
I know people who are smart, but those who run things are just on an entirely different level. Of course being clever is always beneficial, but there are places where pure intelligence cannot take you. I don't know where I'm going with this, just find this topic interesting and somewhat overlooked.
This gives me a thought - maybe there's a time-energy thing to it too.
So let's say that IQ is an expression of how much intelligence you are applying at the moment. Maybe it's at the maximum when you're doing some hard thing, but it probably isn't that high all the time. Most of the time, you're using much less intelligence. Even smart people do pretty dumb things once in a while. So then for every person, there is a "peak IQ", which is the maximum amount of intelligence you can ever conjure up. And there's also a measure for maybe "IQ minutes" for how long you can apply that level of intelligence and what level of intelligence you are capable of applying at other times throughout the day.
If you take an IQ test, presuming that you want to take it and want to score well, then you do what's needed to ensure you're at peak IQ, so that it measures your actual peak IQ. It is still a useful measure, but it's harder to measure how much you can actually apply that and how much intelligence you display when you aren't being tested.
Maybe the average smart person is really smart for like 3-4 hours total at work, and maybe 1-2 in their personal life. This is plenty to have a good job and make a good living and have an interesting hobby or two.
Maybe what Elon Musk really has is extraordinarily high IQ minutes. Thus, his peak IQ is generously high but not out of the league of smart people worldwide. But if he can apply all of that intelligence for, say, 18 hours a day, versus 6 max for the average person of that IQ, well then he can get quite a lot done. Like start and run a revolutionary electric car company and also a revolutionary rocket company, and like 4 other companies for things that seem a little wacky but could be revolutionary someday, and then I guess buy and run Twitter too just for kicks.
This is an interesting way of characterizing it and I feel similarly. I think about this in the following terms: usually I oscillate between 'lower states' and 'higher states' of mind, and when I work on a difficult task, I get bored or tired or stressed out quite fast, and then I have to stay for a while in the 'lower state' of my mind. People, who I find energetic tend to go into these 'higher states' more easily and concerning Elon, I don't know, maybe he even sleeps in such a state or goes into the flow as soon as he opens his eyes.
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