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The young Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone is not only a talented dancer, she is also very clever.
Classmates remember a girl who thought little of conventions, sometimes violently contradicted the teachers - and still finished with top marks.
Her biographers wrote that the high school cheerleader had an IQ of 140.
According to the classic definition, she is therefore considered to be highly gifted.
The University of Michigan gave her a scholarship to study dance.
But today's “Queen of Pop” never finished it.
Instead, she moved to New York to seek her fortune as a singer and dancer in the clubs there.
Defiant, unconventional and freedom-loving, these are actually characteristics that are particularly often attributed to intelligent people.
That Madonna had a world career as a pop singer - and not as a manager - fits into this picture.
Because scientists, consultants and those affected know all too well: Special intelligence does not guarantee a special career in business.
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A whole series of studies suggests that gifted people often do not do much better in professional life than less intelligent people.
Tanja Gabriele Baudson is a psychologist and gifted researcher at the University of Luxembourg and has an eye on studies of the past few decades.
In numerous meta-analyzes, scientists have researched the connection between intelligence and different success factors and formed so-called correlations.
According to this, the connection between intelligence and school grades is tight, the one between intelligence and promotions, income or even happiness in life, on the other hand, is very loose.
The Estonian sociologist Tarmo Strenze evaluated data sets from the USA, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Estonia, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden and found that about a third of the school grades achieved can be explained by the respective intelligence quotient.
In contrast, income after the age of 29 depends only to a mere five percent on the measured IQ.
The educational level of father and mother as well as their income played a significantly more important role overall.
Gifted: Many go into business for themselves
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Generally speaking, people are considered gifted if their intellectual ability exceeds that of 98 percent of the population.
According to current tests, this corresponds to an intelligence quotient (IQ) of 130 or more. It is used to measure logical thinking or spatial imagination, for example.
Skills such as creativity or social skills, however, are not shown in the tests.
"Intelligence helps," said Baudson, a psychologist.
On the other hand, it is by no means a guarantee of advancement.
“For success in the job, the most important thing is the right fit.” Your own skills and needs have to match what the respective work environment offers.
Gifted people, like other people, could have very different interests.
Some are more technical, others more artistically oriented.
Social skills such as empathy or sociability are no different among the quick thinkers than among the slower ones.
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“The supposed interpersonal awkwardness of gifted people is a prejudice.
There is no scientific basis for this, ”said Baudson.
However, it is due to the fact that particularly intelligent people are often motivated differently than others.
“For them, autonomy is extremely important, as is the pursuit of competence.” The desire to rise in hierarchies and absolutely take on management positions can take a back seat.
No wonder that there are particularly many highly gifted people in independent and research-based professions.
The clever are disproportionately represented among inventors.
Scientists from Finland, France, the USA and Belgium have compared data from the European Patent Office with the IQ tests that Finnish military service providers take on entry.
The result: the likelihood of becoming an inventor increases exponentially with the IQ. Intelligence is even more decisive than education and even the income of the parents, which after all offers the young inventors financial independence.
Some gifted people in search of professional happiness only find their way into self-employment at the second attempt - whether as an inventor, entrepreneur, consultant or creative person.
The social therapist Andrea Schwiebert has specialized as a consultant for gifted adults.
Many of their clients are not happy in a classic career path.
"You seem to have too much potential, too many interests and too high an internal motivation."
Source: WORLD infographic
In her book “Kluge Köpfe, krummewege?” Schwiebert identified stumbling blocks for the careers of intelligent people.
They usually have particularly high demands on the job.
It should challenge and inspire them, give them a lot of freedom and, if possible, serve even higher ideals.
In addition, there is often a particularly high level of expectation from the environment.
According to the motto: You are so smart, you have to become something special.
Some gifted people are also very enthusiastic, but have little stamina for activities that they find boring.
In addition, Schwiebert came across a particularly large number of highly sensitive people.
"On the outside everything looks normal, inside the bear is raging."
A 43-year-old client summed up her incessant search for happiness in her job as follows: “Now I've grown up, but I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.” Want her name rather not read them in the newspaper.
"Gifted", some apparently perceive that as a stigma rather than an award.
Especially when you are looking for help.
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The psychologist and researcher Baudson, however, emphasized that one should not infer the entirety of the gifted from problematic individual cases.
"You don't go to the coach when you are happy and everything is going well," she said.
Larger samples showed that intelligence is not a hindrance to one's own happiness in life.
Strictly speaking, it has hardly any measurable significance for the feeling of happiness.
In other words: Cleverness doesn't make you happy, but it doesn't make you unhappy either.
"And that," says Baudson, "is a very nice finding."
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This text is from WELT AM SONNTAG. We will be happy to deliver them to your home on a regular basis.
Source: WELT AM SONNTAG
This article was first published in September 2019.