Terman, a young professor of psychology at Stanford university, decided to make the gifted his life's work. He sorted through records of 250000 elementary and high school students, and identified 1470 children who's IQs averaged over 140 and ranged as high as 200. This group came to be known as the "termites". He tracked them throughout their life like a mother hen. He said once that there is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ, except possibly his morals. The book Outliers describes that the relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of 120, having additional IQ points doesn't seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage. In fact the universities where people come from that have won the Nobel Prize where not any better than Notre Dame or the University of Illinois that's all. So success does not matter if you are really intelligent you just have to be smart enough like smart enough to get into college but not necessarily Harvard. Even if Harvard were one of your choices you would find more smart people at Harvard but, it would not necessarily translate into success. If Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same kinds of family backgrounds as the Termites, and dispensed with IQ a altogether he would have ended up with a group doing almost as many impressive things as his painstakingly selected group of geniuses.
The story of two geniuses is very interesting. One genius goes to college loses his scholarship because his mom failed to file the financial forms. Then his transmission on his car runs out and he can't get the college to change his classes so he drops out. Another genius who has helped on the nuclear bomb he was a genius too who went to Harvard and Cambridge. His tutor (who later won the Nobel Prize) forced him to attend to the minutiae of experimental physics, which he hated. He grew more and more emotionally unstable and took some chemicals from the laboratory and tried to poison his tutor. But, all the discipline he got from that was to be put on probation. This brings into mind that intelligence that allows you to talk your way out of murder or convince your professor to move you to the afternoon class is why at the psychologist Robert Sternberg call "practical Intelligence.". Practical Intelligence includes things like knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect. Ernie has high practical intelligence and that is what makes him so good with people.
Where do you get practical intelligence? Well that is where we get into parenting. Wealthy parents intervened on their children's behalf, middle class parents use concerted cultivation to foster and assess a child's talents, opinions and skills. Poor parents tend to follow a strategy of accomplishment of natural growth. The middle class child is exposed to a shifting set of experiences. They are expected to think for themselves, challenge adults, and work out their own solutions to problems. But, given support from their parents in these endeavors. It appears Concerted cultivation is the key factor in developing practical intelligence.
Terman put his termites into 3 different categories based on how successful they were. The A's of course were very successful, the B's satisfactory and the C's dropouts. Then he tried to find the reason why they were there. It turns out the A's came from families in the middle to upper class who had parents that used concerted cultivation with books in their homes. So to make it to success you have to have a family or community supporting you and helping you navigate the world IQ is not enough on its own.
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