11 stupid ways smart people sabotage their success
("Silicon Valley"/HBO) Thomas Middleditch as Richard Hendricks in HBO's "Silicon Valley."
Sometimes the smartest people do the dumbest things.A group of Quora users drew from their experiences to address the question, " What are some stupid things that smart people do? " The answers shed light on some of the common ways intelligent people unknowingly undermine themselves and how they can get out of their own way.
We've highlighted several below.
1. They spend too much time thinking and not enough time doing.
"Because thinking comes so easily to smart people, doing becomes relatively harder. Research and planning are great in moderation, but can offer the dangerous illusion of progress," says Silicon Valley entrepreneur Chris Yeh . Smart people who are perfectionists can get caught up in this kind of seemingly productive procrastination and often nitpick over minute details rather than finishing projects.
2. They follow the pack.
Venture for America's Andrew Yang has written extensively about the trend of top college graduates going into the same few prestige industries, like finance and consulting, rather than following their passions.
New York entrepreneur Lee Semel agrees: "Many smart people often seem to be followers, probably because they grow up spending so much time pleasing others via academic and extracurricular achievement that they never figure out what they really like to work on or try anything unique."
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We see this quite a lot on Internet discussion sites (not NT of course-- butt all the others
)
Needing to be "right":
When I first saw the article I thought it said:
And of course these do apply to people in general.
But IMO a few of them are especially relevant to highly intelligent folks....
Someone once said that a successful executive surrounds themself with people who are smarter than they are...