The majority of people are not half as intelligent as they think they are

[Haole Girl]

The others never fully realize their potential.


That is my observation for this morning.

Thank you for your attention.

:rant:

[Deja Q]

1. Why do they not realize their full potential?

The others usually end up running bulldozers.

[Haole Girl]

2. Agreed

:hi:

[Wapsie B]

3. Some just happen to have a job skill that pays very well.

Others have a circle of friends/ family that get them good jobs, or know how to get hired on their own.
Others like myself were the dreaded average student, garnering neither scorn or encouragement on or way through the education system and have fended for ourselves.

Nominated.

[TheFriendlyAnarchist]

4. Grades are a poor indication of intelligence though.

I have great grades, which unfortunately leads me to have a habit of overestimating my intelligence. I like to think that I'm smarter than I am, and the grading system only gives me rationale for doing so. . .

[Haole Girl]

13. You're fortunate...

...by the time I decided grades mattered, I had to work very hard to raise my G.P.A.!

[Haole Girl]

5. It is a difficult life...

...when one is labeled average. But, if you are like myself, it probably caused you to be very resourceful.

:hug:

[Wapsie B]

7. Yes that is very true on both counts.

I've made a lot with what I've had. Many would've given up but I didn't and won't.

:hug:

[av8rdave]

6. And some of us are just living proof of the "Peter Principle"

[Deja Q]

8. Some peters are bigger than others, but it's not the size of the peter but how well one can

speak in front of an audience to sell a product?

[av8rdave]

10. That's a great nugget of wisdom! A little long for the book title, but...

It's a bestseller waiting to happen!

[Haole Girl]

11. Please define that...

;-)

[Esra Star]

29. People get promoted to one step beyond their capability. nt

[Orsino]

9. And they annoy those of us who are. n/t

[Haole Girl]

12. Hey... they annoy those of us who aren't, too!!

;-)

[gmoney]

14. I would count Randi Rhodes on the "not as intelligent" side...

well, at least not quite as intelligent... unless she's sometimes being deliberately dense. What grinds me most is when someone calls, they're a little nervous, and don't communicate quite what it's obvious they mean, but Randi always picks apart the literal words to try to belittle them.

That, and mispronouncing words OVER AND OVER...

That, and she doesn't understand the difference between a business making a profit, and one that is profiteering. I don't have a problem with a company that sells a tire at my corner tire store for $100 and makes $25 or even $50 on the deal. That's a profit, necessary to keep the store in business. What I have a problem with is a contractor selling that same tire to the military for $500 or $1000 because they have a no-bid, cost plus contract... that is profiteering.

Nevertheless, I'll continue to listen, although her distortions are becoming a little more obvious. (She seems to be promoting the idea hat all 180,000 the "contractors" in Iraq are Blackwater paramiltary types. I'm guessing a big percentage of them are people doing food service, providing laundry, and other mundane stuff that army personnel used to do, but now they're "needed for combat." Of course, we end up assigning a military person to protect the truck driver or whatever, so it seems like there's not much advantage.)

[Haole Girl]

16. I've never listened to Randi Rhodes...

..unless I did and didn't know it!

[MedleyMisty]

15. What do you call realizing your full potential?

A lot of people seem to think that life is all about external rewards and say that you are or aren't intelligent just based on what you get paid to do and don't care about what's inside at all.

[Haole Girl]

17. Not talking about external rewards...

...just utilizing the mind.

[MedleyMisty]

22. Cool

I do think I'm reaching my potential that way.

It's just I'm so used to the idea of "potential" meaning that if you test well in school you must end up a corporate executive and make a ton of money.

[Bennyboy]

18. In any situation there will be more dumb people than smart people....

Ken Kesey....

[Haole Girl]

20. mmm...

..usually! ;-)

[La Lioness Priyanka]

19. many studies have proven your first point true, its a phenomenon called

the above average phenomenon, in which everyone thinks they are above average

[Haole Girl]

21. Hey!

And I didn't even get a $20,000 grant for that! :-)

[Xipe Totec]

23. And when did you become aware of this?

Think carefully,

this merits a considered response...

[Haole Girl]

24. lol!

Is this a trick question?

:rofl:

[Fire Walk With Me]

25. I'm not dumb; I just don't give a f*ck.

Paraphrasing "Night of the Comet".

[Haole Girl]

32. Yeah...

Guess that is a whole other category I forgot about! lol!

[dropkickpa]

26. That's unpossible!

[Manifestor_of_Light]

27. I did well on IQ tests and all that stuff .....

Was told I was brilliant since I was a small child, blah blah blah. Scored three standard deviations off of 100 on a Stanford-Binet at the age of five (147). Shrinks say your IQ goes up some as you get older towards adulthood and college. So I should be even higher up the IQ scale. I learned to read at age three and cannot remember seeing English letters and NOT knowing what they mean. I literally cannot remember not knowing how to read, IOW.

Even though I made good grades and earned three college degrees, I have been unable to get a job where I would be making lots of money and materially successful.

Why? Because good jobs in America depend on WHO you know, not WHAT you know. So I didn't know the right rich people who gave a shit enough about me to give me a chance at a job.

This society is too damned competitive. You have to backstab and be a cheater to get a good job, it looks like, if you don't know the right people and only have your talents and skills to go on. I refuse to backstab and gossip and withhold information, and do all those other things people do to sabotage other peoples' careers. I have standards. Those are pretty unfashionable in the business world.

However, I'm gonna fulfill my potential in other ways, that don't involve making tons of money. Money is not the goal of existence.

There are many different kinds of intelligence and skills, and just because you are smart and hardworking doesn't mean you'll be materially successful. The idea that the boss will pat you on the head and promote you is long gone, and a college education does not lead to a good job. That's a total lie and a farce that colleges sell to kids.

IQ is highly overrated unless you can do something practical with it, like be an engineer or fix cars, or help people, or at least entertain yourself with it by reading and learning.


President Eisenhower was shocked when he was told that one-half of the people in America were below average.
:rofl: :rofl:

[MedleyMisty]

28. I don't know the numerical result of my testing in school

But I know that the summary of the results said that I was performing at college level in fifth grade and I see no reason to not believe it - I was doing my brother's senior English homework for him in second grade - he didn't want to read Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None so I read it for him and told him the answers to his homework questions. :) In third and fourth grade I researched the Holocaust and read all the books on it in the local library - stuff like Martin Gray's For Those I Loved and this white hardcover named Treblinka. And I asked my mother for a subscription to Newsweek in fifth grade. I took the SAT in seventh grade and my verbal score (570 in 1993, which with the recentering that's been done since would be somewhere in the 600s now - and that's with a mother who could be called the complete opposite of pushy so it's not like she'd been exposing me to stuff) qualified me for Duke's TIP program, which was really fun and one of the best experiences in my life. I got a full scholarship each summer, or I wouldn't have been able to go.

I totally agree with you, and I battle that prejudice about intelligence = making lots of money and having a high powered job all the time. I try to tell people that no matter how intelligent you are you most likely aren't going anywhere if your parents aren't rich, and the response is, "I can't waste my beautiful mind on people who aren't born with financial and social advantages as well as genetic intellectual advantage."

It shows up in a lot of the literature on intellectual giftedness, too. They always focus on "eminence" and doing great things externally. For some reason you never hear about people like a guy I worked with at Arby's who was obviously gifted. He'd grown up in hotels with his drug addict mother and moved in with friends as soon as he turned 18 and graduated from high school. But he wouldn't even show up on people's radar as gifted, just because he was born into a tough situation. And the attitude of a lot of people is that he's not gifted at all because he didn't somehow magically come up with the money for college and connections for a well-paying job or enough free time to create art.

Social Darwinism and totally unregulated fascistic capitalism are two of the most destructive and evil ideas the human species has ever come up with.

[Haole Girl]

34. Hey...

I wasn't ignoring you... I just realized I didn't reply to your post... sorry!

Seems we're neighbors. I'm in Texas, too! :hi:

Anyway... I hear what you are saying. My husband is a triple-degreed Engineer (very intelligent) and it doesn't mean he'll have job security at all. There are many extremely intelligent unemployed people out there right now. It doesn't help that our country's economy has gone to hell due to * and his criminals... and the quagmire in Iraq.

[DarkTirade]

30. Unfortunately I'm in that second category.

However I might be able to get back in school soon so that could change. :)

[Haole Girl]

31. Oh, I hope you can!

It's terrible when people don't get the opportunities they deserve. Good luck! :hi:

[mark414]

33. think of how dumb the average American is

and then realize that half the country is dumber than that.....

(to paraphrase Mr Carlin)

[Haole Girl]

35. It's one thing to deal with people who are not intelligent...

..but what is unnerving, to me, is when they get a self-righteous and condescending attitude about something they know very little about. Their sentences usually start out something like, "Well, I happen to know...." *sigh*