Why idiots are more successful than you

your high IQ is a problem

What’s good Young and Eager mind?

You know what’s fascinating…

How acceptable it is to talk about how dumb you are.

I don’t read books.

I can’t do math.

I can barely add two numbers in my head.

Not even talking… bragging!

Being dumb isn’t just accepted, it’s almost admired.

I think it’s cuz it’s viewed as humulity.

However, when a trait is normally distributed, you’ll have people on the right of the mean too.

Folks who’re above average.

While that comes with its own set of problems, it’s a faux pas to discuss those lest you wish to be seen as braggadocious.

I get why, cuz the set of people who think they’re smart but aren’t is much larger than the set of people who think they’re smart and are.

However, let’s assume you self-identified correctly.

I wanna talk about one specific issue of being smart.

Overthinking

There’s a fallacy that a lot of smart people suffer from.

They deeply believe that the quality of one’s thinking has a correlation coefficient (R) of 1 with the outcome.

I.e. Good arguments/good thinking always lead to better outcomes than bad arguments/bad thinking.

That might very well be true in deterministic environments ranging from simple to complicated.

But that’s very much not the case in complex ones where no one has a clue what the hell is going on.

Slightly exaggerating but don’t wanna turn this into a technical piece.

I recommend It’s Not That Complicated by my friend, the brilliant Professor Rick Nason, for more on complex adaptive systems’ role in business.

The idea that the person with the best argument has the best solution doesn’t hold in entrepreneurship.

And that’s why people much dumber than you are succeeding.

If you’re smart, you’re used to making sense of the world

So your first inclination will be to try to get to the bottom of things.

Unfortunately for you, there is no bottom in this case.

Meanwhile, the idiots just take massive action.

In a game where luck plays a major role, that is exactly the strategy you want to adopt.

I hope you don’t interpret this as “it’s all luck.”

You can definitely increase your odds of success with skill, digital ethnography, pre-selling, customer development, building an audience, and all the other things I’ve taught you.

However, if there were an equation for the probability of success, “luck” would be a multiplicative (not additive) variable in it.

I.e. if it’s set to 0, it doesn’t matter if everything else is maxed out. You’ll still fail.

Conversely, you can succeed by doing things badly if you happen to be massively lucky.

The takeaway of this is to stop overthinking things so much.

Pick an audience, research their issues, pre-sell, talk to prospects, and just get going.

Move quickly.

Use your intuition.

You’re not in uni, so no one cares how rigorous your research is.

Try more things and put yourself in a position to get lucky (serendipity & sagacity). [1]

Notes

[1]

Reference

Austin, J. H. (1979). The varieties of chance in scientific research. Medical Hypotheses, 5(7), 737-741. https://doi.org/10.1016/0306-9877(79)90035-5