Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2013; its description of Amancio Ortega as one of the world’s five richest men, the website traffic rankings for Spain and the US, and the Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo references reflect that time.
While it’s true that what we call an intelligent person is usually tied to IQ, we could start by saying that it’s obvious that if one person has managed to amass a fortune and another hasn’t, it’s only because the first was smarter than the second. That doesn’t mean they have a higher IQ.
There are many studies showing a correlation between intellectual ability and success, although they’re not entirely accurate. As a rule, people with a high IQ do succeed in their careers, but as part of a company. In other words, people with a high IQ tend to work for people with a lower IQ, which doesn’t mean those people are less intelligent.
Success has nothing to do with raw intelligence. It comes from work, circumstances and the time devoted to a specific skill.
Let’s take two cases we all know. On one side we have Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who does have a high IQ. He’s what you’d call gifted, a brilliant mind. On the other we have Amancio Ortega, owner of Inditex and one of the five richest men in the world, who didn’t study beyond primary school.
Put Amancio Ortega in charge of Facebook and he would be completely lost and would almost certainly fail. Put Zuckerberg in charge of a textile empire and, in the same way, he wouldn’t know how to run it. That’s specialization. You won’t succeed outside your passion or what you know how to do.
Be careful not to misread some of the recent articles where we’ve featured millionaires who never went to college. I’ve even seen headlines like “Millionaires who never opened a book”, and that’s completely false. We’re sure that the millionaires who didn’t go to college have studied far more than the graduates have, with one difference: they studied to learn, not to pass exams.
For some reason, millionaires learned two of the subjects that universities don’t teach you (at least Spanish ones): entrepreneurship and finance.
Harvard is said to be the university that has sent the most millionaires out into the world. Some people think Harvard students become millionaires because Harvard is a university for millionaires in the first place. That isn’t true either. An earlier study by Jonathan Wai, a researcher at Duke University, concluded that those students came up with great business ideas thanks to the contacts they made at the university. Your circle of friends also has an influence on your success.
We’ve sometimes pointed out differences between Hispanic and American entrepreneurs, and here’s another example. In the United States, the most visited websites include sites about entrepreneurship and finance (Forbes, Entrepreneur…), while in Spain the most visited is Marca.com (football). There’s nothing wrong with liking football, as long as we’re clear that Leo Messi’s and Cristiano Ronaldo’s goals don’t bring us any benefit.
In short: your IQ doesn’t determine whether you reach your financial goals. What does is the knowledge you acquire throughout your life, specializing in a particular sector, continuous study, hard work and persistence. Those qualities have nothing to do with IQ, although they do have to do with the intelligence to apply them correctly.
Further reading
- The secret of millionaires, told by millionaires
- What does being rich really mean? A former Goldman banker explains
- Jim Rohn: success was easy for me; for others, neglect was easier
Featured image: Scarlet Sappho, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
