I happened to come accross this article today:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110510/us_yblog_thelookout/why-geeks-make-better-adults-than-the-in-crowd
Basically the gist of it is more or less the old trope of the “popular” kids in high school tend to end up as unhappily married fat losers in dead end jobs while the “nerds” go on to become succesfull billionares like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
But is this true?
My limited impression of the real world is that having and making connections with the right people is very important, and if you can do that then great.
But in high school popularity is more about athletics and appearance, not as much social intelligence or emotional intelligence. So being a good athlete and an asshole may make you popular in high school but means nothing outside of it. But knowing how to read people, finding out who has what you want and how to get it, how to negotiate, etc. are important.
FWIW, the most financially successful people I went to high school with were an eclectic group, and I have no idea how each of them ended up in their vocations. A good friend of mine from school turned out to be a very competent entrepreneur who owns several of his own businesses, while several of the nerds now have PhDs but earn far less than him. But how do you even define successful? Career, income, education, interpersonal relationships, intrapersonal relationships, authenticity, spirituality, sense of fulfillment, autonomy? Who knows. A friend of mine from college had parents who were both specialty physicians, so they had high income, high levels of education and lots of prestige. But they hated each other and were miserable.
And I’m sure tons of nerds end up in shitty lives too.
So by and large, no I doubt it. I think having good social skills is important though. But I’m sure there are lots of fucked up nerds and happy popular kids.
Besides can anyone really tell how someone will be at 30 or 40 based on how they are at 18?
Either way
In my own experience, no, it is not. But that’s just my own personal experience.
At my high school, the coolest people - the sports stars and their good-looking girlfriends - were generally the children of successful businessmen, usually contractors involved in practical trades like construction and its related fields. These guys generally wound up working for their family business in some way, and making good money. The girls, being good looking with sunny personalities, wound up doing stuff like real estate and insurance. Some of the cool kids were also the kids of successful faculty at IU; these kids generally went to college and got decent jobs afterwards. And some of the cool kids were farm boys, and they generally wound up either working on the farm or going to college or vocational school for some practical trade.
All in all, successful.
A few of the star jock types became local townie burnouts but not all that many.
I didn’t really know too many of the “nerds” of my high school very well but from what I have heard from friends who were close with them, many went on to study things like engineering and computer science. They’re probably pretty successful too.
For every nerd that made a billion, I can show you one that now lives in a dumpster.
For every “popular” guy in high school, I can show you one who became an outcast.
It’s easy to find examples to prove your point, no matter what it is, which just proves: All generalizations are inaccurate, including this one.
I doubt that; I don’t think people actually live in dumpsters.
I was reading some of the comments on that article, and one of the commenters mentions how he was bullied in school so he joined with the band members who were also bullied. He then mentions how some of those band members ended up forming the music group Korn, which went on to become rich and famous (basically implying that the losers and outcasts went on to be successful).
But I’ve read Brian Welch’s biography (ex-lead guitarist for Korn) and he talked about being chronically depressed, angry and suicidal both before and after becoming rich/famous; and eventually turned to religion to save himself from the drug addiction and emotional problems. He also talked about how singer Jonathan Davis was so suicidal his bodyguards real job was to stop Jonathan from killing himself rather than protect him from anyone else. The definition of successful needs to be changed if living that way makes you successful.
Fame and fortune doesn’t make you successful if you are chronically suicidal and have to turn to addictions to distract yourself from pain (fame seems like a total pain in the ass anyway). And how many bands became famous/rich anyway? 1 in 6000 or something like that? What of the other 5,999 bands made up of outcasts who never become rich or famous?
I noticed the article differentiated between “perceived” and “actual” popularity-- and I think that makes a difference.
In my high school, there was the “cool” crowd. They were a section of male jocks and their contingent of Mean Girls. As far as I know, nobody really actually liked them (particularly the girls). You just wanted them to like you out of some weird status thing-- or to keep them from harassing you. They were big into partying, drinking, smoking pot, sleeping around, etc. They’d be the first ones to mock you for good grades or “dorky” activities.
There was a layer under that, comprised mostly of people the cool people sure THOUGHT were outcasts and losers, only we really weren’t. We played uncool sports, did drama and other art clubs, got good grades and went to college. We were lame and uncool but mixed among groups and tended to have plenty of friends-- from our own uncool social sets anyway.
Then there was another layer-- the true outcasts. People who were somehow off. The kid who never spoke to anyone, the one who didn’t bathe, the ones who were SO nerdy they couldn’t hold a normal conversation…
The people from list A-- many of them are still in the same town, blue collar jobs or maybe (maybe) an AA degree. My high school’s Queen Bee is a hairdresser who had a baby at 19. The B-list went to college, and successfully on from there. My general friend group from school are all successful white collar types, plus a doctor, a chef, and a Navy helicopter pilot. I honestly have no idea what happened to anyone from the bottom-- save the one SuperNerd someone told me got a Phd from Cornell. . . so I guess he’s doing okay.
Now, this was a low-income, semi-urban blue collar town. In the wealthy suburb where my sister went to high school (my parents moved, after my Dad’s business took off), the math was completely different. The coolest girl her HER senior class went to Harvard.
The really hot chicks seemed to manage to parlay that into a comfortable life, mostly.
you mean it’s no longer about EQ? finally!
In my high school, the popular kids were the ones who had lots of friends. We didn’t have many extracurricular activities - no sports, no clubs - so there was no real gauge of popularity other than how much people liked you.
Being likeable is as useful a skill for adults as it is for kids. I haven’t been in touch, but I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the popular kids were successful later in life.
I think a lot of it has to do with what sort of town / school system you went to. I grew up in a small middle class town in Connecticut with an economically mixed population. We were an hour and a half from NYC, 3 hours from Boston, and you had cities like Stamford, Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport within an hours drive. People generally didn’t stay in the town more than 5 years after graduation.
My class had about 250 students and I’m facebook friends with a pretty good cross section of them so I can see what they are doing 20 years after the fact.
The thing is, most people don’t really fall into the John Hughes film / Mean Girls stereotypes.
The captain of our football team wasn’t some tall stud and was actually a little dorky.
You had some jocks who were smart and studious who fit into the sort of “scholar / athlete” culture of the Ivy League / Patriot League schools. A lot of them end up in sales of some kind.
The captain of the basketball and baseball teams was a typical overacheiver, a bit pretentious but likeable and sort of classically good looking in a Robert Kennedy sort of way. I ran into him in NYC and he had quit investment banking to pursue acting (and I think he might be gay).
Study nerds ended up in finance or technology.
Creative nerds ended up in artistic fields.
A lot of the “don’t give a shit about school” type ended up joining the military or becomming cops or firemen.
The most off-beat of the popular girls is a flight nurse on a medical helicopter crew out in California.
The skater punk metal head kid I was best friends with in junior high had some moderate success with his band back in the 90s and is still heavily involved with the area music scene.
I would say the greatest predictor would be less of whether someone was superficially “popular” but what their interests, personality and habits were in high school.
At my school, popular = rich. And of course the rich people had a better chance of becoming successful. Furthermore, they were mostly the smarter people, especially in high school when the poorer people had to have jobs.
No.
I know a lot of very smart people who thought being smart was adequate. They are now 45 year old bitter laid off computer programmers convinced the executives at their companies are stupid, convinced they are smarter than every manager they’ve ever worked for. IQ wise, they probably are. But it DOES take some social skills. At least the social skills to recognize that “popular likeable guy Steve Ballmer” would make a good executive moving your company forward. Or the ability Michael Dell had to say “I need better management skills - I’m going to hire some managers while I learn this.”
And I know some people who in high school were very motivated to keep up appearances. When you are very motivated to keep up appearances, you don’t tend to end up in dead end jobs, overweight, and unhappily married.
That isn’t to say that some geeks aren’t successful (married to one, am one myself), and that some of the popular crowd don’t have miserable lives. But, I’d guess this has a horrible inverse R-squared value.
Yep, my experience comports with yours exactly.
I think that we should first get our definitions nailed down:
Nerd: One who is notably good at school subjects, particularly math and science.
Geek: One obsessively into science fiction, fantasy, D&D, comic books, etc…
Dork: One who stands out for social ineptitude.
I believe that the relationship between nerddom and dorkdom is overstated anyway. While it’s certainly true that there is some positive correlation there, there are many kids who are both popular and academically successful. Hence it’s a false dichotomy to suppose one must choose between one track or the other in high school or elsewhere.
What’s a nice term for those of us who had the trifecta?
I suspect the degree to which people actually give a shit what happened in high school is negatively correlated to adult success.
I wonder how many professional athletes were nerd?
In my high school the ‘cool’ people were the guys who could afford or have a nice fast car, and the girls who slept with them. Also, the guys who were in one of the various gangs, especially gangs from the neighborhoods (i.e. not the baby gangs at the high school, but the real gangs from the barrio), and the girls who hung out with them. I don’t believe that many of these folks became very successful, post-high school, unless you measure success in terms of criminal success.
I was relatively popular in high school…I had friends in the gangs and who had fast cars (I didn’t have a car in high school…we were dirt poor and even my folks only had one beater for a car for the whole family), I was on the track team and played baseball and football in my junior and senior year, I was considered ‘smart’ (i.e. I could read, knew how to speak English with a relatively slight accent, etc etc), and I had friends who were the pre-cursors of the nerds and geeks from later generations.
I haven’t been to any of my high school reunions, but I know that most of the people who went to my high school were singularly unsuccessful…most of the ones still alive are still living in the same neighborhoods and doing the same things they did before. I only know a few people from my old neighborhood who got out of that situation and left the area, and I’d say that the majority of them were not the people who were considered popular.
-XT
I was a gerdock.
I found each of those traits helped me to be successful (happy, satisfied, and comfortable).
Science and math skills have helped me to be a problem solver. Sports helped me to be a team player and to recognize strengths in others that compliment areas I may be weak. Lastly science fiction and comic books gave me a sense of wonder about the world and taught me to look to the future and see where technology is going.