Business Secrets from the Bible: Spiritual Success Strategies for Financial Abundance

Secret #8

Become a People Person

What psychologists call the intelligence quotient (IQ) is just an attempt to quantify human intelligence. The problem with this is that intelligence is hard to pin down and define. Measured IQ is poorly correlated with happiness, health, and wealth. There is even some evidence that people with a very high IQ tend to be less successful at making money. Highly intelligent people gravitate towards academia more than the general population. Almost any financial planner will tell you that few demographics are, generally speaking, as bad with money as university professors.

There are exceptions, of course. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway are both exceptionally brilliant businessmen and they both happen to have super-high IQs. But they are in the minority. Most people with high IQs are not outstandingly successful, either financially or socially. Many people with very high intelligence do not have a lot of friends because they have trouble befriending people they consider less intelligent than themselves. Furthermore, people are often uncomfortable around someone who seems to be too smart for their own good. Extremely intelligent people can come across as aloof and not completely forthright. They are not necessarily dishonest; there is simply a big cognitive gap between them and the average person, and this can be alienating to the general population.

While a high intelligence quotient (IQ) is poor at predicting ...