The philosopher Socrates advised his followers to “know thyself.” Truly great executives need to be able to self-assess their strengths and weakness in general, and in particular regarding the strengths and weaknesses of their own thought processes. In short, they know how to “think about their own thinking.“
You can get insights into the mental processes of today’s successful entrepreneurs from biographies of people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. But we should also look at those in the scientific realm who were also successful “entrepreneurs” in the sense that their achievements changed how scientists, and we, ultimately think about the world. Newton, Pasteur, and Einstein all come to mind. That’s entrepreneurship at its highest level.
Fortunately, one great scientist took time to assess his own mental capacity: Charles Darwin. His “Origin of Species” laid the groundwork for the theory of evolution by natural selection that prompted a biologist writing a century after Darwin passed: “Nothing in biology makes senses except in the light of evolution.”
But success is not always about raw intellectual power. Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway studied Darwin’s thought processes and concluded that “ Darwin would have placed somewhere in the middleof a good private high school class.”
So, if it wasn’t about his IQ, what accounts for Darwin’s massive contribution to human knowledge? A short article from the Farnam Street blog provides an explanation. Find out How Charles Darwin Mentally Overachieved his Starting IQ. Maybe you’ll start to think, and succeed, differently…and you won’t need an exceptional IQ to do so.
