Smartest guy in world...

[Irishman]

I came across something recently related to an old topic.

The column

Why did William Sidis, the world's (2nd) smartest human, achieve so little in life? (10-Dec-1999) (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/991210.html)

The previous discussion

The Smartest Guy in the world.. maybe (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=492)

The column discusses William Sidis, a guy who was tested and found to have an exceptionally high IQ, but who wasn't successful in life (definined by making a lot of money, becoming fabulously wealthy and famous, becoming a household name, winning a Nobel prize, curing cancer, etc).

The discussion talks about smart people and why they may not measure up.

Along those topics comes this article:
http://more.abcnews.go.com/onair/2020/2020_000713_iq_feature.html

It's a bouncer with an IQ measured at 195.

He chalks up his lack of a professional career path to negative experiences in school. Also, money has not been something he has concerned himself with.
“There’s no logical connection between being smart and having money,” he says. “Now, being smart helps if you want to have money, but if you aren’t necessarily focused on getting money in the first place, there’s no reason smarts should make the money roll in.”
Langan believes his story illustrates the difficulties some exceptionally gifted individuals encounter in their lives. He says he dropped out of college because he was bored and felt no one took an interest in him.

If offered the chance to do anything he wished, Langan says he would like to make a living by trying to solve the mysteries of the universe.
For some time, he’s worked on an ambitious book on the subject. He describes it as “a bridge between mathematics and science on the one hand, and theology and the humanities on the other. For the many seeking a millennial synthesis of human spiritual and intellectual progress, it will be just what the doctor ordered,” he adds.
He’s almost finished with the tome, titled Design for a Universe, and hopes to find a publisher for it soon.

Without the proper attention and guidance, Langan says talented individuals can miss opportunities that will enable them to reach their potential. Armed with ideas, he has sought to develop a way in which he could help
exceptional children avoid some of the problems he faced. He recently helped establish a nonprofit corporation, the Mega Foundation, in order to achieve that purpose.

[Duck Duck Goose]

To me, the saddest part of this whole thing is the narrow definition of "successful in life". These guys are "failures" because they didn't discover a cure for cancer? Well, gee, I guess I'm a failure, too. What about things like holding down a job, paying bills once a month, raising children, making a difference in your community, no matter how small? We can't all be Nobel-prize winning economists (and that's probably just as well--how would the mail ever get delivered, or the dishes get washed?)

[DSYoungEsq]

There is a fallacy inherent in the discussion in the OP and in discussion of people like Sidis. When the OP talks about Sidis as not being "successful in life", it fails to understand the difference between "success" and "achievement". Success should always be measured to some extent on a personal basis, and is dependent upon what goals a person establishes for him-/herself. If I don't want to be famous, but I want to have a nice family with three kids and be happy in my job, I may not want to do somthing that causes the rest of the world to notice me; doing so would result in fame that would make it difficult to succede in my quest for contentment.

Achievement, on the other hand, can be viewed in very impersonal terms. True, the person who is successful at being happy with life has achieved his goal, but has his/her achievement done anything significant for the rest of the world? Becoming rich is an achievement, but it doesn't mean that the person has added much to the world, either; Bill Gates' wealth is far less important an achievement than the successful promotion of an obscure operating system into the main method of running personal computers worldwide. My fianceé's success at helping school children here in Ohio as a school counselor I consider an important achievement, but it pales in comparison to the achievements of someone like Mozart or Einstein. While there certainly can be spirited disagreement over how exactly to measure the value of certain achievements, the point is that they CAN be measured against each other because the result isn't dependent on an individual's personal desires.

It should be noted that Cecil in his column didn't suggest that Sidis wasn't successful. Cecil did note that Sidis did not achieve much of anything significant; in this, Cecil is correct, based on the information available. But this doesn't mean that Sidis wasn't successful. He might very well have been quite happy and content, waking up every morning and congratulating himself on successfully avoiding the limelight into which society had tried unsuccessfully to thrust him at a tender age. But for a man so gifted with the ability to think, his failure to significantly to our understanding of the world means he did not in any way achieve what he might have.