Intelligence - how much do we really need to succeed? In Hong Kong, youngsters with high IQs are often treated like celebrities, and the thinking seems to be that they will be the ones who will be most successful in life. After all, higher grades lead to better universities, which in turn lead to higher pay, prestige and power.
But two recently published books suggest otherwise.
In Outliers, American author Malcolm Gladwell says the importance of intelligence is fractional in terms of eventual success. External factors like cultural background, family, native language, and often sheer luck, can be far more important.
'We spend too much time obsessing over the individual and not enough time talking about all the people around the individual,' Gladwell said in an interview with ABC.
Take Bill Gates, the most successful man in the world, and whom Gladwell interviewed extensively for this third book. Gates, who studied in Seattle, was no straight-A student. Instead, the founder of Microsoft flunked high school exams and eventually dropped out of university. Only a genius, one might assume, could defy such odds to become the wealthiest man in the world. But Gladwell says another aspect of Gates' life was more fundamental.
Gates attended a private middle school in Seattle that was wealthy enough to buy one of the United States' first computers.