You can have a high IQ, and yet be a slacker in life.
Why? Because IQ is still only a potential of the brain… not independent of what you use or not use, what you expose yourself or not…
I once had an employee who I hired because she was a Mensa Society member. Mensa only accepts people to be members whose IQ tests say they are above 130… I think. But, between you and me, she was a useless employee and I had to let her go.
Since then I don’t trust IQ tests. You can have a high IQ, and yet be an underachiever in life.
I don’t know… maybe I was one of these people… Maybe not.
My parents KNEW that I was stupid all my life, and every accomplishment I have ever had they either did not notice, or surprised them… I am both dyslexic and near-sighted… and I didn’t get glasses until I was 9. By then the label stuck.
It is hard to tell what shows yourself that you have a higher IQ, until it either drops or it goes higher.
IQ dropping is frequent… when you are in survival mode, and your cone of vision gets narrow… you get a lot dumber. Or when you are tired… distracted… sad, upset, grieving… or maybe even just hungry… or eating food that is not good for you…
IQ rising is rare. With life, poor habits, poor eating make IQ plummet.
Mine has been rising recently because of My Secret Weapon… the Big Bundle energy that keeps consciousness awake, alert, and pay attention. That is not how consciousness normally behaves.
I’ve had three massive brain damages (from not sleeping and working too much, I think) in my life so my brain is like Swiss Cheese… it has large holes in it. The surrounding gray cells took up most of the workload… but the number of gray cells I can use for brain work is about half of what it was before my brain damage.
About a week ago, I think, Consciousness realized it… lol and it threw a fit… I am not kidding you… it didn’t like it at all.
But regardless of the Swiss Cheese brain, my available intelligence has risen, I feel, a whole lot.
One of the ways I check how high my available IQ is, at the moment, is by playing Freecell… a computer card game. The trick is to use the game to recognize and learn patterns. My base nature is impatient, impulsive, act without thinking, act without looking.
As a child I got punished for it… but it is still my base nature. Hübele Balázs (Hungarian)… overeager, eager beaver…
Freecell can be played either like that eager beaver, letting this quick action nature drive it, or this nature, this over-eagerness being controlled, but for what? What does playing slower accomplish?
Today I discovered that if you look at the end game that you can actually foresee even before you start moving the cards, then the likelihood of winning a game is about 100%.
And then my brain said: “Begin with the end in mind…” Stephen Covey said that. I read the 7 habits book decades ago. And only now realized what that habit meant.
When I look at my activities, all of them, I see it everywhere… I have never really done anything honoring that principle… I start things and without deciding where they should lead… and surprisingly they rarely go where I would have decided to take them… had I decided to take them someplace… the end.
But I have gone to places I didn’t think I’d need to go to fulfill on some divine purpose…
So I suggest a modification to Stephen Covey’s sentence: Begin with the end of mind if you know what end you want…
- In architecture: of course you need to know.
- In Freecell… I can see it now, it is really useful to know… because Freecell is simple: you want to win.
- In cooking you want to cook something that tastes and looks good
- In a diet… whatever you wanted to accomplish…
But elsewhere the end that you can hold in your mind is very limiting: the end, more often than not comes from a puny place… or a misunderstood need, want… and probably will be unsatisfying…
In my 20-30 day challenges I want people to just learn stuff to do two things: 1. practice consistency 2. create a situation where they can observe their behavior… so they can know themselves better.
Of course you can pick a useful skill to learn… but you can do it on your own… here, on my site, self awareness and self growth are always the goal… regardless of what actual plan you have for your life.
If you, for example, notice that you do everything to win… you may want to wonder what it says about you and if you want to continue that way.
The book I have been pushing in my articles, the book I finished listening to about two hours ago, has some amazingly unexpected things to look at if you are one of these people who always wants to win.
It’s a long book, six and a half hours to listen… near intolerable to read… for me. The written version wasn’t holding my attention… Maybe its language…
I don’t like nonfiction… amateur nonfiction… but the content of this book is sooo valuable, I suffered through it, and I will suffer through it again, and maybe again.
I am reading it to be a better teacher for you… If you consider me your teacher.
I have an orphan participant… someone who doesn’t have a partner. So I offered to be his partner.
What I didn’t expect is that I can be a participant, and get more that way. So I shared, on our partner call, an upset… and took it through the “script”… and I was stunned about what I found. Never expected it. Grieved for all the incidents in my past where I didn’t have what I discovered today, grieved how I limited myself in the past, grieved for all the pain I have endured, while looked like a self-serving pompous a*s to others.
Wow… talk about learning.
And talk about freedom.
Now I see what my eager beaverness covers up, and when, predictably, I’ll be eager beaver in the future, I’ll know how people take it, and I’ll know not to go there myself, not to beat myself up.
Now I just experienced what people are paying in the Playground… what a great program!
thank you Suzanna. You saying that means so much to me.
I thought I had to know the end before I began. Just begin..
Thank you for your articles. They mean so much to me.
No, I don’t consider that..But it’s good to learn a new word…vigilance..
… yes, or if you consider work a 4-letter word, then you can use vigilance… instead.
Yes, I can see that..And as you’ve been telling me before, It won’t go away..but you can manage it. That requires work…
Nice work Kawa. Congratulations. Big result. Now the bad news: it still takes work to not be your meek/forceful self…
The playground is a secret weapon in my opinion as much as the big bundle, requiring maybe more work from your (my!) side and as i see it, it requires me to do “the work” differently than I’ve ever done before.
I saw it in the weekend when I was the coach in a children’s team in a soccer match. My base nature and how I have been before is coming from powerlessness. Pushy, forcing, demanding either meek or cocksure. In this match I was more creative, joyful, dynamic and even inspiring.
The end in my mind was not about me personally, to look good, win, justify or avoiding responsibility. It was about the work. To get the kids to play the game according to our football philosophy, give their best on the field and to see what is working and what can we help the kids improve. We lost the match but that didn’t matter. I felt joyful all the time, even after the match.
So hell yeah…the playground is an amazing program…
My appreciation for this article, although I don’t see value in IQ it is just numbers (mine is below 130)
and like the Stock Market goes up and down with the moods of the moment, the weather, in my case the hurricane seasons. but thanks for the tremendous help, that you ofer.
By the way ,I play Freecell in “Microsoft Collection” and it keep my awareness and my vanity in check, if I am in the moment.