Why Highly Intelligent People Seldom Succeed In Life

The world no longer revolves around the gravity of perfect intelligence and a large brain capacity does not mean you can crush your competition with a force that is titanic. The world has changed and being intelligent doesn’t normally equate to being a successful person. I mean look at the example of the blue whale. It has a monstrous brain, but it still doesn’t know how to avoid whalers or use its immense size and weight to capsize some of these pirates who try to use their meat for profit. The reason why some highly intelligent people fail to find success in life is because they lack certain skills, communicative ones especially. Can a blue whale raise a protest? Not really.

Ok let’s get real. The truth is, intelligence comes with a certain sense of pride and a fundamental flaw in one’s sense of judgment. That intelligence can blind these very people from the insensitivies that they exude and how others view them. These people also think that the route to power and success is derived purely from intelligence and they sometimes live in a fantasy world that they create around their supposed brain power - a world which they constantly look down from.

This is a distance that develops whether or not they realise it and sometimes, a person can be disliked simply because of his or her intelligence. This distance is sometimes so far apart that it gets to the position where one side of the fence can’t listen to each other, the messages get garbled and miscommunication sets in. One side thinks the other is stupid and the other thinks they are haughty. More often than not, the ones who consider themselves intelligent end up on the short end of the stick. They become unpopular with most of the people around them; they become reclusive and start to have a low opinion on everyone around them in the constant journey to find intelligent conversation. They get ostracized in community and this leads to what people called a deficient personality and a ’super ego inferiority complex’. The result? A massive loss of confidence that no doubt affects the way they relate to others, and coupled with what might have been a lack in communicative skills in the first place, it’s a guaranteed one-way paved road to failure.

It doesn’t help that they get a culture shock - especially when they leave college (the haven of most of the intellectuals) and realise success and riches don’t always and sometimes never come naturally with intelligence. In short, it becomes an emotional roller coaster ride that leads them to failure. While some might think this is a dramatic picture to paint, it is sometimes the end result of some people - people who get so involved in this mindset and get so disappointed in the real world that they become stunted, emotionally and lose all ability to communicate with the world outside them. Once the lose all form of self confidence and their capability for success, they end up stuck in such a frame of mind, and getting out of such a state can prove to be a monumental task indeed.