How Smart Do You Have to Be to Succeed?

We often think that the reason we aren't succeeding is because we haven't found the right strategy or because we weren't born with the right talents.

How smart do you have to be to succeed? How intelligent do you need to be to become a successful entrepreneur? How good does your training program need to be to become an elite athlete? How perfect does your weight loss program need to be to burn fat?

what determines your ability to write well more than anything else is writing a lot. Once you reach the threshold of writing a decent sentence, the thing that leads to success is writing more.

To summarize, the study started with the smartest group of children in the entire state of California and then tracked their success throughout their entire lives. Decades later, the researchers had discovered something very interesting.

Writing: Assuming you understand the core principles of writing and the basics of grammar, what determines your ability to write well more than anything else is writing a lot. Once you reach the threshold of writing a decent sentence, the thing that leads to success is writing more.

Threshold Theory

Entrepreneurship: Assuming you know what the most important metric is for your business, what makes the biggest difference is focusing on that metric every day. Once you cross the basic threshold of knowing what to work on, the most important thing is continuing to work on that one thing and not something else.

In 1921, there was a psychologist at Stanford University named Lewis Terman who set out on a mission to conduct a research study unlike any before it.

Although many people continue to equate intelligence with genius, a crucial conclusion from Terman’s study is that having a high IQ is not equivalent to being highly creative. An IQ of 120, indicating that someone is very smart but not exceptionally so, is generally considered sufficient for creative genius.”

But nearly every lineman in the NFL is over 300 pounds. There is a threshold that you have to cross to get the job. After that, it's anyone's guess as to who will be the best. We can think of intelligence in a similar fashion.