為什么課堂上最聰明的人不是最成功的？

Brendan Kelly, Ph.D. in Pure Mathematics and Author of "Intelligence"
The answer to this question depends upon your definition of success. A famous postcard circulated in the early part of the last century carried the caption, “If you’re so damn smart, why ain’t you rich.” Implicit in this question was the assumption that success is synonymous with the accumulation of wealth. It is probably true that the smartest person in the classroom does not ultimately become the richest, and there are reasons for this that I will address later in this response. First, I’ll address the converse question: “Were today’s richest people the smartest people in the classroom?” The following table (pilfered from my book on Intelligence and IQ) shows that the ten richest people in the world, as identified by CEOWORLD Magazine on February 28, 2020, had high or very high IQ’s and in most cases, high SAT scores.
Yet, as brilliant as these entrepreneurs are, there are others who register higher on the “book smarts” scale. Biographer Mark Leibovich, (The New Imperialists: How Five Restless Kids Grew Up to Virtually Rule the World. p. 78) describing a career-changing moment in the life of Jeff Bezos, reports:
One night during his freshman year, [Jeff] was struggling over a partial differential equation he had to complete for a quantum mechanics class. After a few hours of frustration, he and his study partner visited the dorm room of a classmate, who glanced at the equation and said, “Cosine.”
“After we expressed some incredulousness,” [Jeff] says, “he proceeded to draw three pages of equations that flowed through and showed that it was cosine.” It led to a realization: There were people whose brains were wired to process abstract concepts in a very graceful way, and he [Jeff] was not one of those people. “It was initially devastating,” he says, “very, very, troubling.”

布蘭登·凱利，純數(shù)學(xué)博士，《智力》一的作者
這個(gè)問題的答案取決于你對(duì)成功的定義。
上世紀(jì)早期流傳著一張著名的卡片，上面寫著: “如果你這么聰明，為什么你不富有呢?”這個(gè)問題隱含著這樣一個(gè)假設(shè): 成功就是財(cái)富的積累。
課堂上最聰明的人最終不會(huì)成為最富有的人，這可能是真的，這里有一些原因，我將在后面的回答中解釋。
首先，我要回答一個(gè)相反的問題: “今天最富有的人是課堂上最聰明的人嗎?”
下面的表格( 從我的《智力與智商》一書中搬來(lái)的 ) 顯示，世界上最富有的十個(gè)人，正如《世界經(jīng)濟(jì)論壇》雜志在2020年2月28日確定的那樣，智商都很高或者非常高，而且在大多數(shù)情況下，他們的 SAT 成績(jī)也很高。

然而，盡管這些企業(yè)家才智逼人，但還有一些人在學(xué)習(xí)成績(jī)上的排名更靠前。
傳記作家馬克 · 萊博維奇在《新帝國(guó)主義者: 五個(gè)焦躁不安的孩子是如何長(zhǎng)大并最終統(tǒng)治世界的》一書第78頁(yè)描述了杰夫 · 貝索斯生命中一個(gè)轉(zhuǎn)變職業(yè)的時(shí)刻，報(bào)道說(shuō)：
在他大一的一個(gè)晚上，杰夫正在為量子力學(xué)課上一個(gè)必須完成的偏微分方程而苦惱，在經(jīng)歷了幾個(gè)小時(shí)的挫折之后，他和他的學(xué)習(xí)伙伴來(lái)到一個(gè)同學(xué)的宿舍，那個(gè)同學(xué)看了一眼公式，說(shuō)了一句: “余弦?！?br /> “ 在我們表達(dá)了一些懷疑之后,”(杰夫)說(shuō)，“他接著畫了三頁(yè)方程式，并表明它是余弦?！边@讓我們意識(shí)到：有些人的大腦能夠以一種非常優(yōu)雅的方式處理抽象概念，而他[杰夫]不是其中之一，他說(shuō): “這事最初對(duì)我來(lái)說(shuō)是毀滅性，非常、非常、非常令人不安?！?/b>