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, even if you don’t realize it. How many years of schooling do you have? Twelve? Sixteen? More? Here’s a news flash: many of your classes were thinly veiled IQ training sessions, designed to prepare you for standardized tests like the SAT and GRE that measure your IQ. (Really, they do; researchers can use students’ SAT scores to predict their IQ to within a few points.) After all that training, how much more room do you imagine your IQ has to grow?

For most of us, the same isn’t true of creativity, emotional intelligence, and the rest. Unlike the IQ-type activities most of us practiced in school, the education system spends little time honing these non-IQ skills. (For instance: when was the last time someone explained the mechanics of intuition to you, or told you what science has to say about activating it? Yeah—that’s what I thought.) Whereas IQ is a pitcher you’ve largely filled, your non-IQ brain skills are nearly empty jugs waiting for juice.

So if you’re looking to eke out another few points on an IQ test … well, you know what to do. Just keep doing the kind of training you’ve been doing all your life. But if you want to get your brain functioning better in ways that matter, stop trying to painfully squeeze another mile or two per hour of top speed out of your already finely-tuned IQ engine. Instead, join me in thinking about how to maximize the IQ you’ve already got. Learn how to drive your mind.

And no, you don’t have to take my word for whether this stuff actually works. Every claim and exercise in these pages springs from interviews with some of the country’s top brain researchers and studies published in peer-reviewed journals. This is real science, people. Here you’ll learn what top psychology researchers have to say about cultivating correct intuitions and overbalancing bad experiences with good so that age leads to wisdom. You’ll learn to clear clutter from the path to an insightful solution and boost the skills of executive function: willpower, focus, and multitasking. And much more.

Hopefully you’ll even enjoy it. That’s because this book knows the lesson of the New Year’s resolution: a promise to do something you hate will last about as long as your New Year’s hangover. Instead, the vast majority of the exercises in these chapters, while remaining scientifically sound, are meant to be fun. You get to dissect the illogical quotes of world leaders, sort ladybugs, solve riddles, role-play as MacGyver, write your own limericks, and combine illustrated elements into Rube Goldberg machines.

That’s not to say the exercises in this book are easy—if they weren’t challenging, they wouldn’t do you any good. The moral of the booming field of neuroplasticity is that the more you stretch your brain, the more you can change the patterns of its wiring. And by its nature, a simple path creates a simple brain. Instead, the key to successful thinking and wondering and evaluating is, well, spending time and effort on the brain-bending experience of thinking and wondering and evaluating.

But stretching your mind needn’t be horrible and frustrating and boring. Perhaps the most important lesson in this book of lessons is that putting the engine of your mind to hard work can be fun. And while you’re having fun putting your brain through its paces, you’ll also be pointing the Lotus of your life toward success.