For any career, there are plenty of people of lower IQ who outperform those with much higher scores, and people with greater intelligence who don’t make the most of their brainpower, confirming that qualities such as creativity or wise professional judgment just can’t be accounted for by that one number alone. “It’s a bit like being tall and playing basketball,” David Perkins of the Harvard Graduate School of Education told me. If you don’t meet a very basic threshold, you won’t get far, but beyond that point other factors take over, he says.
