It is a poignant feature of our species that we can contemplate intellectual work that we can't quite accomplish. Forgetting for a second all of the difficulties associated with the construct of IQ, a person in possession of an IQ of 160 is not a better person than someone who possesses an IQ of 120, but she is better equipped to do abstract math. However, she herself is less equipped than someone with an IQ of 180, and that person is less equipped than a person with an IQ of 200. That is all natural.
It is also natural that we will experience emotional pain when we recognize that the work we would love to do—whether it is physics at the highest level, constitutional law at the highest level, psychological fiction at the highest level, or biological research at the highest level—is, if not completely unavailable to us, just unavailable enough to make it doubtful that we can proceed and just unavailable enough to make our efforts feel like torture.
In such circumstances, not only may you not be able to proceed with the work you deem most meaningful to you, but you will also know that you are not moving forward because your brain needs just this much more horsepower. As a result of this knowledge, you may decide that life is a cheat, blame your upbringing for robbing you of some measure of your native intelligence, and in other powerful ways experience sadness and frustration—all because of a naturally occurring gap between what you want or need and what you have.
This is an emotional pain that psychology hasn't examined: the pain of wanting to do certain intellectual work but not being equipped enough to do it. It's easy to empathize with the pain of a minor league ballplayer who is just not quite good enough to make it to the big leagues. Indeed, excellent documentaries have been made following the plight of exactly such players. We watch such documentaries, and we understand.
We've seen documentaries about dancers who aren't quite able to rise to the top because they lack some physical endowment. We've seen similar documentaries about pianists, about violinists, about singers—that is, about professionals in fields where we can see this natural diversity. But what would there be to see if we followed five mathematicians? Since there would be nothing to see, this problem has no public face and little power to provoke a public discussion.
In part because these challenges are invisible, we tend not to think about them or talk about them. But they remain painfully real for the people who suffer. It is in the American psyche to act as if there is an answer to every problem, but what happy face can we put on this particular problem? That short stout man, while he may make the occasional beautiful shot from mid-court, really can't play center for the Celtics. That singer with an ordinary voice really can't compete for the lead in Tosca. Some things are genuinely a matter of endowment.
You may not be fast enough for your ambitions, tall enough for your ambitions, beautiful enough for your ambitions . . . or smart enough for your ambitions. There is no good answer to this problem. But there are tactics available to reduce the emotional pain produced by this problem as well as tactics to make meaning despite the meaning crisis that a problem of this sort produces. We'll look at those in a moment.
This smart gap is experienced in all sorts of poignant ways. Janet, a writer, explained:
When working on fiction, particularly when writing narrative in the third person, I can “hear” quite clearly the tone of the prose that I'm trying to capture. I hear this tone in my head much as one hears a piece of music in a silent room. But all too often, the prose that I write falls far short of what I'm hearing. It's like I'm playing a sonata on a long-neglected piano. The text doesn't ring true to my ear—it comes out in the extremes of sounding either glib or overdrawn.
Despite my years of experience as a professional editor, I can have great difficulty getting the words on the page into the same key as what I hear in my head. Applying the usual technical improvements doesn't help; in whatever way the writing falls short, it's far more mysterious and ephemeral than anything addressed in Strunk and White or The Chicago Manual of Style. When I'm not able to get it right, I end up feeling that I don't have the chops to live up to my own artistic vision as a writer.
Is this precisely a smart gap or something else? It could certainly be something else. Maybe this author simply needs to write more and worry less. Maybe her problem is a lack of experience and a lack of that accumulated wisdom that comes from putting in tens of thousands of hours at something. Maybe her environment is too noisy; maybe her mind is too noisy. Maybe she is burdened by too many responsibilities and cares. But it may also be a smart gap problem—and if it is, that will hurt.
Consider the following plaintive report from a teenager I'll call Fernando and two friendly responses to Fernando's commentary. Fernando wrote:
This is exactly where I have found myself over the past twelve months or so. I am seventeen years old. I graduated one and a half years early from high school and was expected to enter college as soon as possible (I have assumed that I would go to college for as long as I can remember). But I became obsessed with the fact that we have innate abilities and that I would never be able to reach any greatly significant level in the field of biology where I hoped to study.
So instead I don't do anything and find myself loaded with antidepressants. If you look at any given field as a tower, there are those who are content on the lower stories or content simply to methodically climb as high as they can climb; and then there are those few people who will get to the top. I fall into a third category: those who may make it very high but are destined to look up sorrowfully at the top that they will never reach because they simply don't have the abilities. I have always been prone to depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, but there is such logic in my sorrow that I can't seem to pull myself out of this hole.
Emily responded:
Fernando, you are very self-aware. I suspect that very awareness is relevant to your depression and your obsessive-compulsive disorder. But I also think that you've turned up the heat with a fear of failure and kicked away the ladder of possibilities, killing off any escape from your frustrating dilemma. Success in any field is the result of multiple factors. Intrinsic talent is a bonus to any pursuit, lessening the struggle to competency or mastery, but it doesn't necessarily predict success.
Individual motivation can be a powerful force behind hard work, persistence, and other variables and can compensate for lagging talent and natural disadvantages. Maybe there will always be some individuals who surpass your accomplishments, your talent, or your intelligence, but that doesn't mean that you can't pursue your interests, your dreams, and your life. Your contributions could be unique and highly valued, and your participation could put your life onto a path to something amazing.
Don't give up on yourself. Living with mediocrity may be abhorrent to you, but with the help and support of friends and family, with professional advice and guidance, and with more life experiences, you'll learn to cope. Trying is better than living with regrets. It's easy for me to say, but don't be afraid of failure or mediocrity—they can be sage teachers and can help you overcome adversity.
Roberta offered the following:
Fernando, I agree that a smart gap can sometimes exist, but I can't ignore my internal revulsion at the fatalistic overtones of such an idea. I also agree that people should be somehow well matched to their endeavors, but if that were always obvious at the beginning, many greats would not have pursued their paths and many current celebrities would certainly not be famous!
Why not think about the following steps that may help you achieve what you're after?
I agree we are not all Einstein, but Einstein is an icon to be admired, not a blueprint for individual success. IQ and talent are two pieces of the puzzle, but they are separate from achievement, which requires a high amount of effort, adaptation, and strategizing to produce the external rewards we seek. Manifesting worldly success through innate ability is a complex combination of efforts.
Emily and Roberta's responses to Fernando's predicament are very reasonable. They are practical, optimistic, and clear-eyed in their understanding that accomplishment and success do not necessarily or even usually relate to a person's pure brainpower. Intellectuals and intellectual lightweights have become president. Intellectuals and intellectual lightweights have written bestselling books. Therefore it is certainly the case that you do not want to write yourself off too quickly! If you sense that a given thinking line of work is a potential meaning opportunity, you don't want to dismiss it—especially because any given individual's menu of meaning opportunities may prove short rather than long.
At the same time, smart gaps do exist. They exist for all of us. To some extent, we can narrow the gap; to some extent, we can ignore the gap; to some extent, we can work around the gap; to some extent, we can reconcile ourselves to the gap. Making meaning entails exactly such efforts! But if on a daily basis you want to make meaning in a certain way and you can't because of some shortfall in your native capacity, that is going to hurt, and that is going to matter.
If such a gap exists for you, it is good to be honest and clear about its existence and to then think through what you want to try to do to bridge it, if that is possible, or otherwise deal with it if bridging it isn't possible. It is a worse policy to deny the existence of a gap you are experiencing, even as it causes you distress and even as it affects your ability to do the work you've set out to do, than to forthrightly acknowledge the gap—and then strategize.
What can you do?
First, you can help your brain be its best. This means many things, from not drinking alcoholically to silencing negative self-talk that robs you of confidence to tackling your chosen intellectual subject in a regular, disciplined way. It means deciding to get a grip on your mind, think fewer small thoughts for the sake of your big thoughts, distract yourself less, flee from the work less, and make fewer excuses about why you don't have the time, patience, or ability to think.
Second, you can contemplate what intellectual work matches your native ability. It is entirely possible that devising the most complicated plot in the history of plotting serves you considerably less well than choosing a simple plot that allows you to write a deep, lovely, but also straightforward novel. Maybe there is a puzzle in your field that suits your brainpower, a corner of your field that is delicious and also not too hard, a way to do the work you want to do that makes use of your other strengths. You will only know if any of this is possible if you admit that there is a problem, step back, and consider your options.
Third, you will want to be kinder to yourself. How many smart people torture themselves to the point of institutionalization over the fact that they can't turn out poetry as brilliant as the poetry produced by their idols, can't solve a mathematical problem that has thwarted all the biggest brains, or can't create summations like Clarence Darrow? You can torture yourself and threaten your mental health, or you can decide that such self-torture hardly serves you and strive to stop it.
Fourth, you might make your primary intellectual work matter a little less by making multiple meaning investments and seizing multiple meaning opportunities. That is, rather than putting all your identity investments, intellectual investments, ego investments, and meaning investments in, say, your biological research, you might invest in it and also in activism, in service, in relationships, in enjoyment, in just being, or in other areas likely to provoke the psychological experience of meaning.
Fifth, you might surrender to the possibility that you don't really know one way or the other whether the smart gap you sense is a real biological impediment or a function of something that might change with time and effort. You might in a sense dismiss its reality, act as if it didn't exist, and see if it narrows or vanishes as you work hard at your chosen discipline. You acknowledge the gap, thumb your nose at it, go about your meaning-making work, and monitor if the gap was perhaps a chimera all along, if it's perhaps narrowing, if it remains wide but no longer seems that important, or if it remains a pressing issue.
In this last instance, if the gap remains real and significant, if it continues to matter to you, and if it feels unbridgeable, you can redouble your efforts by working to update your personality, quiet your mind, increase your knowledge base, or with some other tactic. Intelligence is not fixed. We are smarter on some days and duller on other days. We sometimes get excellent ideas several steps above our intellectual pay grade. You can certainly build a little optimism into your considerations about whether you are smart enough for the work you want to do. Tempered by that optimism, however, must be the clear-eyed understanding that we have not been built for the purpose of solving puzzles that are too puzzling for us.
These gaps amount to real problems in the lives of smart people. Whether the gaps are bridgeable or unbridgeable, more real or more imagined—whatever their exact nature or their exact reality in a given situation—when you sense a smart gap in an area of life that matters to you, it is bound to produce the experience of pain. Reducing that pain is essential. You might try different tactics of the sort outlined in this chapter and others I'll chat about at length in future chapters. But it is imperative that you do something. Living in pain while trying nothing is not the answer.