When Attitude Trumps Intelligence

You’re probably very aware that these days educational merit tends to be given great weight. It has become an accepted truth that people can only be successful in life and business if they have a university degree, and it must now be from a top educational establishment as well, not from just any old college. 

Frankly, there’s a great deal of snobbery and misinformation around this issue. It is true that education is important; I would never deny that, but we have lost our way a bit and we are also in danger of neglecting those talented people who don’t have university educations and still have something valuable to contribute to society.

Stanford University research

It’s somewhat ironic that the evidence I’m going to use comes from one of the USA’s top universities; Stanford in Palo Alto. A psychologist called Carol Dweck, whose life mission is to study attitude, has recently produced a study that reveals your attitude to life and other things is a much better indicator of potential success than your IQ.

Fixed or flexible?

Carol discovered that most of us have one of two mindsets that we operate from: we are either a fixed mindset person or we have a growth mindset. Which one do you think is most likely to lead to business success? 

Let’s see: if you have a fixed mindset, you

 “believe you are who you are and you cannot change.” 

The issue with this is that when the person is presented with any new ideas and work challenges, they tend to believe they can’t handle the ‘new stuff’ and so feel overwhelmed. They get that “rabbit in the headlights’ look!!

The ‘growth mindset’ person believes they can “improve with effort.” This person can outperform a fixed mindset person even if they have a lower IQ measurement.  Why? Well, because they believe they can learn and grow. 

They embrace change and treat new things as an exciting adventure. They are the person who says: I’ve never used social media but I’m willing to learn and they go to classes and spend hours researching techniques until they have created a whole new skillset for themselves that they can now use to find work. They didn’t need to go to Stanford, Harvard or any other university to do that.

Breaking through boundaries

You would think that people who know they are smart have more confidence than the people that society has labelled ‘stupid’ simply because they don’t have qualifications on paper. And to a large extent that’s true. 

Indeed, many of these people are over-confident. However, the Stanford research showed that many of these confident people only reaped the benefits of this feeling as long as the going is easy for them. If they can’t go beyond their comfort zone and break through the boundaries, they face problems with progressing. Growth mindset people tend to welcome setback; they see them as opportunities.

Embrace failure

Ultimately, Carol Dweck says that how you deal with failure is a huge determinant in your success. The growth mindset person looks at a ‘failure’ and says, “This didn’t work, how can I solve the problem?” The fixed mindset person tends to label things ‘failures’ and not look for ways to improve.

So, you see; your attitude can carry you through challenges more effectively than your IQ.  And that’s why you’ll discover that a lot of entrepreneurs didn’t go to university; they were too busy launching their big business idea!