IQ matters for success, but it's not the only factor at work

Terman subjected hundreds of school kids to his newfangled IQ test. Obviously, he didn’t want a sample so large that it would be impractical to follow their intellectual development. So why not catch the crème de la crème ? The result was a group of 1,528 extremely bright boys and girls who averaged around 11 years old. And to say they were “bright” is a very big understatement. Their average IQ was 151, with 77 claiming IQs between 177 and 200. They have also become affectionately known as “Termites”—a clear contraction of “Termanites.”

None of them grew up to become what many people would consider unambiguous exemplars of genius. Their extraordinary intelligence was channelled into somewhat more ordinary endeavours as professors, doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, and other professionals. Furthermore, many Termites failed to become highly successful in any intellectual capacity. These comparative failures were far less likely to graduate from college or to attain professional or graduate degrees, and far more likely to enter occupations that required no higher education whatsoever.

The story goes from bad to worse. Of the many rejects—the children with tested IQs not high enough to make it into the Terman sample—at least two attained higher levels of acclaim than those who had the “test smarts” to become Termites.

A more contemporary example is Marilyn vos Savant, who was once listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the highest recorded IQ. Reportedly, she had taken a revised version of the Stanford-Binet when she was just 10 years old, and got a perfect score! Although there’s some debate about how best to translate that performance into a precise IQ estimate, it is certainly arguable that she is more intelligent than the brightest Termite and any member of Cox’s 301. Yet what is her main accomplishment ? Becoming famous for her super-high IQ ! Exploiting that distinctive status, she writes the Sunday column “Ask Marilyn” for Parade magazine. That column doesn’t come close to the writing in Don Quixote or On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, which her two intellectual inferiors, Cervantes and Copernicus, managed to pull off! An extra 60 IQ points or more didn’t buy her any creative edge at all.
http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/your-iq-matters-less-than-you-think