I watched a very short clip from a Peterson lecture on IQ. In it he mentions one of the puzzles he can’t solve is the fact that perseverance has no correlation with high IQ. According to his model it should as perseverance is a positive trait in the sense that it helps us to be successful and all other positive traits tend to correlate with IQ.

He invited the people listening to his lecture to come forward if they thought they could solve this puzzle. This morning I watched this little clip and didn’t think about it again. Then tonight while having dinner it occurred to me what my answer would be.

Note, not the answer. This is my shoot from the hip, 2 cents worth, answer.

Tbh, I’m not even 100 % sure I understand the whole puzzle, and I’m too lazy and not interested enough to dig deeper to make sure I’m even barking up the right tree here. But I enjoy these types of puzzles so I’ll pretend the jigsaw I’m ‘solving’ is the same one he’s puzzled by. I understand his position to be;

Perseverance is a positive trait, it produces positive outcomes as shown by the data. As this relationship should be understood more clearly by intelligent people - they should have a better understanding of cause and effect - and in other areas they do, why not in this one?

If the above outline is ballpark accurate, then this is how I see it without spending much time on it:

Firstly; Intelligent children see shortcuts more readily than less intelligent children. They see they can achieve the same immediate outcome without perseverance. After all, perseverance means sustained effort - doing what we don’t really want to do. When young, most of our tasks is actually school work and as this is usually judged via a pass or fail, the intelligent kid can achieve the same results with less effort than the less intelligent. Over time, this strategy becomes a habit.

Conversely, the less intelligent need to apply themselves to pass and so this diligence and perseverance similarly becomes habitual.

Secondly, and partly due to the above; The clever adult understands there’s more options, more paths available, to obtain the same, or similar outcome. Indeed, the whole concept of outcomes and cause and effect is often something the less intelligent is only vaguely aware of. Obvious to Peterson, but not necessarily to them.

Therefore, when we only really see the path we’re on, that’s all there is to focus on and we’re more dependant on that path. While being aware of lots of other options, and having the ability to pursue them, is good in some ways, it naturally erodes focus, dependancy and therefore the motivation to persevere along the path one is on.

Thirdly; the more intelligent the person is, the more likely they are to have an ‘I’m smarter than you’ attitude simply because it’s generally true. This translates into a relationship with reality, and other people, that is less humble. They then chaff more in situations that the average person finds tolerable and so are less likely to persevere through tough times. The tough is experienced as tougher than it is to the average person.

Fourthly; What Petterson defines as ‘success’, is not universal. For example, I would disagree with his definition, and it’s much more likely that relatively intelligent people would also develop a definition of success that differs from the ‘normal’ one. While perseverance may well be useful for the ‘Petterson’ success, that ‘success’ is not everyones ‘cup of tea’. Therefore, ‘perseverance’ may well be higher amongst intelligent people on average, but it’s simply perseverance towards an outcome that the data doesn’t define as successful.

If we’re a tradesmen and we persevere along that path, success, as commonly understood, is more or less guaranteed. Other paths, say a businessman, are much more precarious and often involve going down some dead ends and needing to change direction. This relative lack of success likely reflects the inherent precariousness of some paths, than it does lack of perseverance.

Fifth; Related to the prior point, is the whole idea that life is some kind of race and we all get judged by where we end up in old age. Many, including myself, would consider the journey to be more important than the finish line. In my model, I don’t really care what I have, or don’t have, when I’m 70. What does it matter? I’m old, give me a dry room, enough food, internet connection and some books and what else do I need, or really even want? Be nice to have a holiday? My whole life has been one big holiday. Some brag about working hard their whole lives - cool, but better you than me. Point is, peoples values differ and while those who have lived ‘by the book’ naturally judge by the book, that’s not the only book, it’s just the common book.

Translated, this means that the percentage of people in the top 30% of intelligence that define success the same as the other 70% is going to be a lot less. But this doesn’t mean this non conforming segment haven’t being successful, it’s just a different type of success.

My definition of success is levels of happiness. What else can it be? What’s the point of having a lot of material wealth, but being unhappy?

Using my definition, none of what I’ve written above is meant to imply that the intelligent peoples success is better than anyone else’s. Happiness is happiness and it’s emotional. Nor does it imply that it’s easier for intelligent people to be happy. In some contexts, yes it certainly helps, but in other, and probably more contexts, it doesn’t help and is perhaps a hinderance more than anything.

As a kid, my Mom sometimes warned me ‘ you can think too much’. In other words, think too much and it’s easy to over complicate things.

Obviously I didn’t listen, but there’s wisdom in those words.

So, if we take 50 people with IQs of around 90, and another 50 with IQs of around 120 and we note that the high IQ people are significantly more successful as defined conventionally ( I’m not sure what the exact definition is ). Then we note that the perseverance attribute is higher among the less intelligent group and, given we deem perseverance a critical component of success, we find this bizarre. But is it?Not really.

If we measured the two groups by a more organic, logical definition of success - level of happiness - I suspect we’d find that, on average, the higher intelligent group is less happy.

Then, if we zoom in on the sub group that is both intelligent and conventionally successful we’d likely find they’re no more happy, on average, than the universal average. They might be, but I doubt it would be by as much as most people would assume. Also, getting accurate data for this would be next to impossible given most within the conventionally successful group will claim to be happy regardless. They haven’t worked hard for that big house and certificates on the wall to be considered unhappy, thank you very much. Most will tick ‘happy’ even if they’re downing buckets of anti depressants and sobbing to their therapist weekly.

To be fair, in a sense they have a point, as to them that is happiness. They’re only vaguely aware that other types, or higher levels, of happiness exist. Where they do acknowledge they exist those other types/levels are mostly disqualified as, for them, any happiness without the success is not worthy happiness.

Indeed, many would claim happiness is not very important. Ask them what is important and the answer will be in their mirror. Such is the power of ego and why humility is the gateway to happiness, while ego locks the gate.

Some of them would be very happy of course, as the ability to acquire the relevant knowledge that guided their actions in the material dimension, also plays a big part in the happiness dimension if they’re aware of the difference, and some of them would be.

But, much of our motivation to push on to greater ‘success’ comes from the template acquired when young and so, as essentially we’re just colouring in templates, the one that is more complicated to colour in doesn’t return a higher level of happiness than the less complicated one - they both just register as that persons normal.

Without going too far down this tangent, if we consider the story of Buddha’s childhood to be reasonably accurate and he was indeed born a Prince - the Kings only son after about 10 daughters - then his childhood experience was highly unusual. His relationship with reality, what is his norm or template, is going to be very different than if he was born into the average family. He would be very internally referenced, which is to say he does not accept any authority over him. He rarely had to compromise and so going directly to happiness is just his norm. When it came time to marry and shoulder responsibility is it surprising that wasn’t to his taste?

Given the template he internalised, is it any wonder he climbed much further than anyone else and didn’t stop till he reached a reality were ‘ By doing nothing, I do everything’. Much of what we’re motivated to do is status motivation ( along with habits ), but to be motivated by status we must care about what other people think. Their approval, or disapproval must register as pleasure or pain within us to motivate. If we do not get any pleasure from validation, nor any pain from disapproval we’re not dancing for applause.

A strongly externally referenced culture - Japanese for example - is very ritualised and the child quickly learns that pleasure is obtained by confirming to the cultural values and that pain is dished out if he or she doesn’t comply. Pleasure and pain are relative. In time, this becomes how they are ‘wired up’ - their pleasure/pain motivations align with those external values. This is all automatic and unconscious.

Counterintuitively, while we might think Buddha, given his upbringing, would have a BIG ego, he actually had no ego as one has to subscribe to an external hierarchy to have an ego. If we don’t recognise anyone else’s values/hierarchy to be relevant to us, we just do our own thing and relate directly with the environment. Tell Buddha he’s fantastic and he will shrug and keep smiling. Tell him he’s a loser and he will shrug and keep smiling. What values are bouncing around in someone else’s head might be mildly interesting to him, but what relevance do they have for him? As he doesn’t take his own thoughts too seriously, he’s hardly going to worry about what others think.

Which is why I always point out that Buddha was exceptional, and possibly unique, and it’s not about us trying to be like Buddha - we couldn’t even if we wanted to and we wouldn’t want to, as we have a very different template installed. What Buddha symbolises is that less is more and that we make the hard easy to the degree we can the limit the malign effect our ego exerts over us. If we’re marching down the ego path, we’re typically walking away from happiness, and what’s the point of that?

Taoism understands this very well. Which is why it has no structure, no commandments, no right or wrongs. It’s also why most people do not ‘get’ Taoism as to them reality ‘is’ the labels they’ve being trained to see, experience and react to. Internally referenced reality vs externally referenced reality. The vast, vast bulk of us are somewhere in between those two poles and that’s completely normal. Point is, if we want to be happier, we want to shift more to the internally referenced side of the spectrum and nourish our emotions directly. Accept that it’s all subjective and we go a long way to not taking ourselves, and our little lives, so seriously. We become more humble and so we’re not spending our time feeding and defending our ego. We still label to a degree, after all we have objectives and we need to be reasonably well orientated, but we do so lightly, in pencil and provisionally. We still high-five ourselves of course, but we’re laughing at our impulse to do so - we’re not taking our ‘truth’ as being the truth.

In other words, we’re not struggling against reality, we’re flowing with it. We just choose our flow, choose a fruitful path and harvest from that. Other peoples path is their path and their business. It’s not a competition, and if it is, we make our own rules. How can a person not win if they decide their own rules?

In the game of life

The winners are the happy and the losers the unhappy

Yet there's no opposition, and we can make the rules

Ok, another quick point as the story above leads me to it

I mentioned that I happened to watch the short Yoube clip in the morning and then was mildly interested by the puzzle presented but didn’t think about it at all until my little theory occurred to me later in the day and then I wrote this up. To a lot of people, that seems weird, or maybe even not true, but with an understanding of how our brains work, and what service they’re trying to provide, it’s not surprising at all.

Our brains are there to serve our emotions and it does this by trying to provide a reasonably accurate orientation so we can choose one path or another. It attempts to understand cause and effect so it can present the big picture options along with the instant gratification obvious options.

It knows we’ll experience into the future so, along with the present experience, it’s also considering long term consequences. We have an imagination and we imagine what various options will deliver and then taste that ‘movie’.

But, point is, our brain can only use the information it’s being fed. It’s working hard to provide clarity but if it lacks an understanding of the basics, it can’t do that and if it’s overloaded processing junk - movies and the like - it’s got to make sense of all that avalanche of data before it can turn it’s energy and processing power to more relevant matters.

The quality we get out, reflects the quality we put in. If we want it to provide us reasonably accurate conclusions, it must be fed reasonably accurate, and relevant data. Plus, as mentioned above, it can only do so much, it only has limited power, so we have to prioritise.

Our senses sense and our brain tries to understand that incoming information. From the avalanche of information and options it perceives, it tries to select the best option for us given our motivations/objectives and how we’re prioritising them.

It’s complicated, especially in todays confused and competitive world. If our brain is presented with information it’s trying to reach a conclusion from, for example A + t + P - S -K = ? It’s depending on what is understands ‘A’ etc actually is. If it doesn’t know, or worse if it thinks it knows but that belief is wildly inaccurate, then the conclusion reached, and the option chosen will also be wildly inaccurate.

Of course, via our schools etc, we’re preprogrammed with beliefs and values and if they work fine, then all is fine. If not they need to be upgraded, and if we want to think for ourselves and choose our own destiny then we want to upgrade them to be reasonably accurate. Of course, again, we can never be totally accurate as we lack the God like abilities we’d require to know the truth, but we can be much more accurate, we can be ballpark accurate and that’s all that’s needed. Even knowing enough to know we don’t know is a massive step in the right direction as it generates humility.

My IQ is nothing special, probably a bit above average, but not significantly so unfortunately for me. But I do look after my brain and I’m careful with what I feed into it because I’m dependant on it doing it’s job reasonably well. My brain is no Ferrari, but as I don’t abuse it and I maintain it pretty well it tends to get me my objectives one way or another.

If our brain has the base knowledge, it can do the work of solving puzzles unconsciously. For example, I remember reading the Eminem didn’t care about learning what they were teaching at his schools, he just sat at the back with a dictionary learning a wide vocabulary and matching up rythming words. In time, this ability became unconscious - just as when we first drive a car we do so consciously and hesitantly but then, over time, it all happens unconsciously and we chatting away, thinking about other things, while driving very well. For the adult Eminem, producing a song was/is 90% unconscious. There’s very little conscious effort, it’s just like turning on a tap. It’s just there. I know for Springsteen, it’s the same thing. Indeed, when Springsteen has tried to select his topic and build a song consciously the song is usually crap. It’s relatively low quality because he’s using his tiny conscious brain for the job, and not tapping into the massive power of the unconscious as he normally does.

And in my much more limited way, it’s the same. These blog posts are rambling and lack structure because I actually have limited control over what comes out. Many times I sit down to write on a topic -I put a title at the top - but then what comes out has nothing, or very little, to do with that title. This is nothing unique, it’s the same for most writers, or artists.

So we all have this ability, or the ability to acquire this ability and the relevance here is - what do we train our brain to be good at? We’ve got all the power sitting there, what do we want to use it for? We decide that first and then feed it accordingly.

For me, as it was always screamingly obvious that the ultimate objective is a high level of happiness, it was equally obvious what I wanted my brain to understand.