What is the difference between smart and intelligent people?. Intelligence has more to do with our genetics and inborn abilities whereas smartness is generally a skill which can be built on top of intelligence. Or, put it more succinctly:
If we imagine intelligence as the capacity of our brain, smartness would be the art of filling it. In other words, maybe your room ( intelligence) isn’t really big but you are very good in filling it and using it most effectively ( smartness).
However smart and intelligent a person might be, he/she is still prone to fail.
According to In Search of Human Mind (by Robert Sternberg), intelligent people fail because of one or few of the reasons below:
- Lack of motivation
- Lack of impulse control
- Lack of perseverance
- Using wrong abilities
- Inability to translate thought into action
- Lack of product orientation
- Inability to complete tasks
- Failure to initiate
- Fear of failure
- Procrastination
- Misattribution of blame
- Excessive self-pity
- Excessive dependency
- Wallowing in personal difficulties
- Distraction and lack of concentration
- Spreading oneself too thin or too thick
- Inability to delay gratification
- Inability to see the forest for the trees
- Lack of balance between critical, analytical thinking and creative, synthetic thinking
- Too little or too much self-confidence
Smart people have a different set of potential reasons directly or indirectly overlapping with the reasons of failure for intelligent:
- Their goals are lot bigger
- What makes them smart makes them ineffective competitors
- They falsely mistake most people as being more like them than they are
- Thinking by itself is not a success
- They require different kinds of stimulation
What other reasons can you think of that make intelligent and smart people fail?