Creativity over IQ
your genetics are overrated
For most of my life I have been under the impression that someone with a higher IQ than me had a better chance to live a better life than I. I believed that they had by default a head start in which I couldn’t make up for.
Recently, as I’m writing my book “you were built to create”, I came to the realization that the past version of me was terribly wrong. It turns out that IQ means very little when it comes to predicting the quality of someone’s future life: fulfillment, success, etc.
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Quality of life
As someone has since pointed out to me when it comes to one’s future quality of life: “IQ scores are about as meaningful as those ‘Which Harry Potter house are you?’ quizzes.”
The real indicator of someone’s future “good life” is often seen through their level of creativity rather than their IQ score. Incredible news for the non geniuses reading this book, & even the geniuses: creativity can be improved upon & strengthened. Just like you can train your muscles to grow, you can do the same with your creativity. This means we are in control of our own future more so than we thought in a sense. Especially if we were basing our future quality of existence on our lack of IQ points.
Some food for thought on this topic is the trials and tribulation of one of the “most intelligent” men on earth:
"Rick Rosner has taken more than 30 IQ tests, revealing his IQ is between 192 and 198, depending on how the tests define their scores. Before the allegedly second-smartest man in the world became a TV writer, he worked as a bouncer, stripper, and nude model. He famously sued the ABC network for a faulty question after losing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? at the $16,000 level, but lost the case." - Reader's Digest
Yes, this may just be a single example, there are also many examples of high IQ individuals living a great life & seeing a large amount of “success”. Heck I can’t even tell you that Rick losing his case against ABC wasn’t all a part of his master plan to deceive you & I from suspecting him of total world domination… but if you think about it for some time you’ll likely come to the same conclusion as me: there is no single trait that will save us from all of our troubles. Not even a top 0.0000001% intellect. However, what can help push us to make forward progress is in just knowing that we do have some control in our own fate; that we can strengthen our odds over time, instead of throwing in the towel after taking an IQ test & scoring lower than 192 (Rick’s level of intelligence).
Creativity is often found as a better indicator of future success over Intellect because it shows that you can open your mind to unheard possibilities. Many highly intelligent people of the past often deemed modern medicine as witchery, but because one does not know what one does not know: the possibilities to be explored can only be explored by those looking for the alternate route. The highly intelligent human may pass up such possibilities frequently if they lack the creativity to imagine what has yet to be explored thoroughly.
Creative Curiosity
Creativity itself is largely connected to the curious people of the world. To people who do not bother to seem smart, but would rather quench their thirst for knowledge with knowledge. Even if it makes them appear less smart, or even as a complete and utter fool. Growing up we have this curiosity baked into us. Everything is new and everything is a sight to be seen. We ask questions about everything without hesitation of trying to seem a certain way, the tiny humans of the world just want to know what they do not know! Oftentimes we lose this curiosity growing up, and with it: a lot of our creativity. This is to say that our fear of how we appear to others has overtaken our appetite for knowing, and with it learning new things that we have not yet explored.
The good news is that unlike our given IQ score, we can change our creative “score” dramatically to the upside. Sure you may be able to increase your IQ score a few points every many years, but how much tangible results will come of such a thing? My guess is probably very few. When it comes to being more creative, & curious, the results you can expect to see as you increase these traits is of a dramatic magnitude higher.
I could tell you all the ways in which creativity brings you a better life, but the truth is there are not many ways in which it doesn’t. Every area of your life is enhanced the more creative you are: from how you solve problems, to how you look at life: the more creative you are the better your odds are of making something good out of something well-not so good. The only way for you to confirm this though, it to give it a twirl, to see if increasing your creativity, or trying to, is beneficial to you. I could give you a 10 step plan to do “increase your creativity” but there already enough of those out there: if your curious about them, go seek them by all means. Today though, I’ll only offer but a few sentences about “How to increase your creativity”
How to increase your creativity
Here goes it…
If you want to increase your creativity it is simple really: You must explore your interests, which is really what you are curious about, and you must also ask questions that make you think. Questions that may often challenge general assumptions you have about the world. At the end of the day: to be more creative is to develop a growing thirst for exploration & discovery.
How you may go about following what I’ve said above is completely up to you. I know my message here isn’t all that actionable… If you want a step by step exercise for this: then be curious enough to ask, ask yourself, & ask the world. Go explore, or go discover the answer for yourself. To be honest though I’m not sure there can ever be just one good answer, or one answer at all for these types of questions. “How do you be more creative?”. Well you just be as you are, without trying to seem to be anything else. - This is the real challenge, to not challenge who we are already.
The point stands still, that this challenge is one we can still hope to tackle, unlike our given IQ. Which is why I have put creativity well above IQ, as creativity has not only far more potential to grow, but by itself shows more promise that one would explore what comes curious to them: and this to me is something I’ve found to be of great importance when it comes to leading a more fulfilling life.
That’s all for today, if you enjoyed (or didn’t) then consider telling me in the poll below.
your friend,
jack ♠️