Garth Sundem - Beyond IQ: Scientific Tools for Training Problem Solving, Intuition, Emotional Intelligence, Creativity, and More

The Geeks Guide to World Domination

Brain Candy

Brain Trust

Copyright 2014 by Garth Sundem

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sundem, Garth.
Beyond IQ / Garth Sundem.
p. cm
1. Emotional intelligence. 2. Multiple intelligences. 3. Creative ability. 4. Problem solving. 5. Intuition. I. Title.
BF576.S86 2014
153.9dc23
2013022757

ISBN: 978-0-7704-3596-7
eBook ISBN: 978-0-7704-3597-4

Cover design by Nupoor Gordon
Cover illustration by Hein Nouwens/Shutterstock

v3.1

To your brain. Its more than a number.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

In the movie Pretty Woman, Richard Geres character inexpertly drives a friends 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 0100 mph in 9.9 seconds with a top speed of 155 mph. The Colt does not. Theres a pretty womannot the titular characterin the passenger seat of the Colt, and Geres 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.

Thats IQ. You can have all the mental horsepower in the world under your hood, but if you cant 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 theres much, much more that goes into realizing it. This brain-training book for everything but IQ will teach you how to drive your mindto get the most from what youve got under the hood. Entertaining information will help you understand what these skills are and arent. Hands-on exercises will boost your wisdom, insight, willpower, problem solving, emotional intelligence, multitasking, and moreall 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, its only part of the pictureand as youll see in these pages, a far smaller part of it than you might think. Havent you met someone rich and successful who didnt seem like the brightest bulb, in the book-learning kind of way? Or, vice versa, someone whos a walking encyclopedia but just cant seem to get ahead in life?

These gaps between IQ and success arent just dumb (or smart!) lucktheyre due to the influence of all these other, often unmeasured, skills. In the coming chapters, youll 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 pressurethey all make a huge difference in our everyday lives. Chances are that with a 115 IQ and all these skills, youll be happier, more successful, and more fulfilled than a Mensa member who lacks them.

But thats not the only reason to focus on these non-IQ skills. Much as wed all love to supercharge our IQs, the bad news is youve either got it or you dont. More precisely, something like 80 percent of your IQ is genetically determinedyou can fine-tune it, sure, but to a great extent, the engine youre born with is the one youve got.

And chances are, youve already tweaked your IQ as much as you can, even if you dont realize it. How many years of schooling do you have? Twelve? Sixteen? More? Heres 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 isnt 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? Yeahthats what I thought.) Whereas IQ is a pitcher youve largely filled, your non-IQ brain skills are nearly empty jugs waiting for juice.

So if youre looking to eke out another few points on an IQ test well, you know what to do. Just keep doing the kind of training youve 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 youve already got. Learn how to drive your mind.

And no, you dont 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 countrys top brain researchers and studies published in peer-reviewed journals. This is real science, people. Here youll learn what top psychology researchers have to say about cultivating correct intuitions and overbalancing bad experiences with good so that age leads to wisdom. Youll 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 youll even enjoy it. Thats because this book knows the lesson of the New Years resolution: a promise to do something you hate will last about as long as your New Years 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.

Thats not to say the exercises in this book are