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At best, IQ contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success, which leaves 80 percent to other forces.
“The vast majority of one’s ultimate niche in society is determined by non-IQ factors, ranging from social class to luck.”
emotional intelligence: abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope.
emotional aptitude is a meta-ability, determining how well we can use whatever other skills we have, including raw intellect.
We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed, and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.”8
The cognitive scientists who embraced this view have been seduced by the computer as the operative model of mind, forgetting that, in reality, the brain’s wetware is awash in a messy, pulsating puddle of neurochemicals, nothing like the sanitized, orderly silicon that has spawned the guiding metaphor for mind.
Self-awareness, in short, means being “aware of both our mood and our thoughts about that mood,”
Benjamin Franklin put it well: “Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one.”
shifting attention away. Most worriers, however, can’t seem to do this. The reason, Borkovec believes, has to do with a partial payoff from worrying that is highly reinforcing to the habit. There is, it seems, something positive in worries: worries are ways to deal with potential threats, with dangers that may come one’s way. The work of worrying—when it succeeds—is to rehearse what those dangers are, and to reflect on ways to deal with them.
Students who are anxious, angry, or depressed don’t learn; people who are caught in these states do not take in information efficiently or deal with it well.
When emotions overwhelm concentration, what is being swamped is the mental capacity cognitive scientists call “working memory,” the ability to hold in mind all information relevant to the task at hand.
The prefrontal cortex executes working memory—and, remember, is where feelings and emotions meet.
There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse. It is the root of all emotional self-control, since all emotions, by their very nature, lead to one or another impulse to act.
The number of worries that people report while taking a test directly predicts how poorly they will do on it.17 The mental resources expended on one cognitive task—the worrying—simply detract from the resources available for processing other information;
People who are adept at harnessing their emotions, on the other hand, can use anticipatory anxiety—about an upcoming speech or test, say—to motivate themselves to prepare well for it, thereby doing well.
Good moods, while they last, enhance the ability to think flexibly and with more complexity, thus making it easier to find solutions to problems, whether intellectual or interpersonal.
People who are optimistic see a failure as due to something that can be changed so that they can succeed next time around, while pessimists take the blame for failure, ascribing it to some lasting characteristic they are helpless to change.
“College entrance exams measure talent, while explanatory style tells you who gives up. It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success. What’s missing in tests of ability is motivation.
By seeing not themselves but something in the situation as the reason for their failure, they can change their approach in the next call. While the pessimist’s mental set leads to despair, the optimist’s spawns hope.
Albert Bandura, a Stanford psychologist who has done much of the research on self-efficacy, sums it up well: “People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.”24
Being able to enter flow is emotional intelligence at its best; flow represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performance and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand.
Flow is a state of self-forgetfulness, the opposite of rumination and worry: instead of being lost in nervous preoccupation, people in flow are so absorbed in the task at hand that they lose all self-consciousness,
In flow the brain is in a “cool” state, its arousal and inhibition of neural circuitry attuned to the demand of the moment.
The expectation would be that such challenging tasks would require more cortical activity, not less. But a key to flow is that it occurs only within reach of the summit of ability, where skills are well-rehearsed and neural circuits are most efficient.
“Painters must want to paint above all else. If the artist in front of the canvas begins to wonder how much he will sell it for, or what the critics will think of it, he won’t be able to pursue original avenues. Creative achievements depend on single-minded immersion.”31
Empathy underlies many facets of moral judgment and action. One is “empathic anger,” which John Stuart Mill described as “the natural feeling of retaliation…rendered by intellect and sympathy applicable to…those hurts which wound us through wounding others”; Mill dubbed this the “guardian of justice.”
