Beyond IQ: Scientific Tools for Training Problem Solving, Intuition, Emotional Intelligence, Creativity, and More

259 Pages·2014·3.64 MB·English

by  Garth Sundem

ALSO BY GARTH SUNDEM
The Geeks’ Guide to World Domination
Brain Candy
Brain Trust

Copyright © 2014 by Garth Sundem
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a
division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sundem, Garth.
Beyond IQ / Garth Sundem.
p. cm
1. Emotional intelligence. 2. Multiple intelligences. 3. Creative ability. 4. Problem solving. 5. Intuition. I.
Title.
BF576.S86 2014
153.9—dc23
2013022757
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3596-7
eBook ISBN: 978-0-77043597-4
Cover design by Nupoor Gordon
Cover illustration by Hein Nouwens/Shutterstock
v3.1
To your brain. It’s more than a number.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
1. Insight
2. Practical Intelligence
3. Problem Solving
4. Creativity
5. Intuition
6. Your Brain on Technology
7. Expertise
8. Working Memory
9. Keeping Intelligence
10. Wisdom
11. Performance Under Pressure
12. Emotional Intelligence
13. Willpower
14. Multitasking
15. Heuristics and Biases
Exercise Answers
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
In the movie Pretty Woman, Richard Gere’s character inexpertly drives a
friend’s Lotus through the Hollywood Hills, grinding the gears, and eventually
stops at a red light next to a Dodge Colt. The Lotus has a 345-horsepower,
supercharged 3.5-liter V6 engine, which can do 0–100 mph in 9.9 seconds
with a top speed of 155 mph. The Colt does not. There’s a pretty woman—not
the titular character—in the passenger seat of the Colt, and Gere’s character
cocks an eyebrow in her direction and revs the engine. The light turns green.
Gere drops the clutch … and the Lotus bucks to a stop as the Colt leaves it in
the dust.
That’s IQ. You can have all the mental horsepower in the world under your
hood, but if you can’t drive it, there you are stuck on Hollywood Boulevard
amid the smoke of a burning transmission.
In other words, raw intelligence is good: it helps to shape your potential top
speed. But there’s much, much more that goes into realizing it. This brain-
training book for everything but IQ will teach you how to drive your mind—to
get the most from what you’ve got under the hood. Entertaining information
will help you understand what these skills are and aren’t. Hands-on exercises
will boost your wisdom, insight, willpower, problem solving, emotional
intelligence, multitasking, and more—all the things that bridge the gap
between the intelligence in your head and the results you want in the real
world.
Why is it worth focusing on these non-IQ skills? Well, the fact is, while IQ is
obviously important to real-world success, it’s only part of the picture—and as
you’ll see in these pages, a far smaller part of it than you might think.
Haven’t you met someone rich and successful who … didn’t seem like the
brightest bulb, in the book-learning kind of way? Or, vice versa, someone
who’s a walking encyclopedia but just can’t seem to get ahead in life?
These gaps between IQ and success aren’t just dumb (or smart!) luck—
they’re due to the influence of all these other, often unmeasured, skills. In
the coming chapters, you’ll see numerous studies and scientists testifying to
this fact, but for now, how about just one quick example: According to a
study by the former president of the American Psychological Association,
Robert Sternberg, and his frequent collaborator, Richard Wagner (no relation
to the composer!), practical intelligence is actually a far better predictor of
job performance than IQ.
And practical intelligence is just one of these non-IQ skills that turns out to
matter as much or more than intelligence itself. Emotional intelligence,
willpower, creativity, motivation, the ability to perform under pressure—they
all make a huge difference in our everyday lives. Chances are that with a 115
IQ and all these skills, you’ll be happier, more successful, and more fulfilled
than a Mensa member who lacks them.
But that’s not the only reason to focus on these non-IQ skills. Much as
we’d all love to supercharge our IQs, the bad news is you’ve either got it or
you don’t. More precisely, something like 80 percent of your IQ is genetically
determined—you can fine-tune it, sure, but to a great extent, the engine
you’re born with is the one you’ve got.
And chances are, you’ve already tweaked your IQ as much as you can,