What drives us towards success : Our intelligence or vision?

We all must have met many intelligent people till day. These people are branded ''Intelligent'' either by academia or by general public. And, as per general perception these intelligent people are destined to achieve better things than their counterparts. But when they don’t achieve those certain standards then there a room for doubt is created where we feel there is a need to revise our standards of intelligence. I try to discuss this thought in the following discussion.

Recently I was watching this movie ‘’Fight Club”. This snippet forced me to think, four things:

• Should a leader be trusted without an ounce of doubt?
• Does the vision has any correlation with the intelligence?
• What makes a person say that he is a leader or he belongs to a certain group of leaders which makes him command a better sense of achievement and better mental prowess than the follower group?
• What factors are there which makes the reference group better than the counterparts?

Let’s start with the discussion that “What are our basis of our judgment?’’

We generally base our judgments about the person by emphasizing on certain few visible characteristics of him or by using people amongst the subject’s social group as a yardstick. This manner of judgment is suggestive, inconclusive and probabilistic so, let’s try to avoid judge people this way. This kind of judgment does not differentiate between the thought process and the results (whether positive or negative) of these thought processes. So the replication of success is not possible in this scenario, all we are doing is judging someone for the purpose of further incrimination/defamation/several other negative reasons which leads to no value addition in the person’s life. This way of thinking, will leave a person with redundant thoughts which will further act as an anchor and make you sink in a long run rather than advance you in your battle towards success.

Why this kind of differentiation is required at all?

When we build/narrate any success story about an inventor, artist or any successful person in any area or skill, we always emphasize about, what all he achieved in his life (the consequential ends), but we seldom talk about how he achieved the ends. Even when we talk about the ‘How’ part, we talk about the hardships he faced while working towards the consequential objectives. We altogether negate the thought process, the triggers behind the ideas which brought the drive of achievement. The thought process can help a person to emulate the right behaviors and which can further be used as a reference point to guide us to a probable success or at least help us to develop an approach which would propel us towards our goals.

So what is the fundamental problem in our judgmental attitudes?

We continue to base our judgments of goals, aims, success and failures on the materialistic reasons which include the indicators like:

• Wealth accumulated in one’s life
•  Publicity a person enjoys
• The verbosity of the person
• Interest in art and culture
•  Reading habits of an individual
• Spontaneity in the social setups
• Maintaining the public relations
• Resourcefulness of a person in the social and professional setups.

These factors are indicative and visible so we tend to base our judgments on the basis of these factors, but these factors tell us that the person is able to showcase his intelligence. These factors can be faked or emulated for shorter periods of time to portray a point of superiority in certain situations (generally these factors are used to make Marketing pitches and presentations effective) where there is a need to create a WOW!! Factor. For a person who seeks, to enhance the economic and intellectual standards of living, one has to look beyond these mere indicators of success and reach on to the factors which are responsible for these resultant attitudes or behaviors.

So here I raise a question, ‘’What is bigger your intellect or your vision?’’

Let me quote an example here, of one of the most successful businessman Jack Ma, (founder of $ 162.7 billion worth of company, Alibaba.com) who started his career as a lecturer of English and International trade at the University level. In his later years of University career he forayed into an unrelated field, of building websites and gradually by gathering investment and wisdom he formed world’s largest merchant website Alibaba.com. He became a successful entrepreneur and was listed in Fortune’s list of ‘’25 Most Powerful Business people in Asia’’.

Is that just an example of intelligence?  For me Intelligence is just being limited, and doing better than others in a given line of profession and making a bunch of rational choices which his peers would have made had they entered the industry few years earlier than oneself.

This is not an example of sheer intelligence, intelligence could have had been proved just by being a best teacher or by holding a P.hD in Shakesprian/ Immanuel Kant view of thought but, it was a vision of Jack Ma, which made him one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the decade.

Success like Jack Ma needs a little something more than the stereotypical indicators of intelligence. 

He had a little something extra to kick him ahead in the race towards success. He had power to ideate, ability to learn and unlearn, and apply/ exploit the know-how in an effective manner. Another example supporting this argument is from a Harvard trained Economist, ‘’Theodore Levitt’’ who wrote a paper titled ‘’Marketing Myopia’’,(HBR article- On Marketing Myopia) in which he arrives at a similar argument to state this point in market scenario where the conclusion goes like this: ‘’It doesn’t matter how smart, intelligent or well thought your product/ business idea is it will die out one day (Due to competitive environment), unless you don’t have a bigger plan to compete and diversify within an industry as a whole rather than fighting a smaller battle amongst the product leaders of today. That’s nothing but an example proving that vision is bigger than intelligence.

Vision, widens with experience and by keeping your mind open to possibilities. But, intellect is nothing but just a relative complement, like beauty. Definition of Intelligence has changed its meaning through the years but the stress area has always been on, generating matter material results consistently. And all these results should spread across a wide time frame where the sustainability and rigidity of the thought process is tested in diverse scenarios. Under those test conditions only, a thought becomes philosophy and a philosophy then transforms into a decision/judgment.

A last question to ponder upon, “We all are surrounded by intelligent people at our workplaces, but how many of them are the ones which have an idea/opinions which will be worth a dime in near future?” – The ones who have the ability to earn a dime even after stripping off every title and position they have today just with their idea/opinions.These are the people who have started to explore a right thought process.

In the end, I leave you with a thought, "That every inventor and every person who has ever done anything worth to be mentioned in the books of history is not known as an intelligent person but a man with Vision".