Intelligence

As far as I know, it's just an ability to see patterns that much faster.I don't believe that IQ measures anything but one's level of education; when Binet came up with the IQ test, it was to measure the success of educating children, not to measure some kind of ingrained, immutable mental ability.People with high IQ's can come to the same stupid decisions as people with low IQ's; generally, it's just that they come to the decision faster.

What difference?Myself, I've always drawn a distinction between intelligence and cleverness. Most of my college friends are of high intelligence, being mathematicians and computer scientists, etc; but maybe one of them possesses any sort of cleverness.On the other hand, the cleverest man I knew lived in a motel doing maintenece work for the owner at maybe a tenth of what he could be earning as a general contractor. He had an ability to come up with expeditent solutions to problems - of any kind - and do it quickly. He wasn't what anybody would call "brilliant" but he had a piercing cleverness about him.Cleverness, IMO, is way more useful than intelligence. I'd rather have the clever guy in the clutch than any of my high-IQ friends.

I'm in almost the exact same situation - I'm sure I didn't score as well as you probably did, and I'm a college dropout (hopefully I'll be dropping back in next semester or so), but I know how suffocating "potential" can be.But I know I have a pretty high IQ, too. And that's been a source of some comfort, I guess. I mean, a high IQ is only moderately useful. There's other kinds of mental ability that are much more useful, like cleverness, or a good memory, or determination. High IQ people don't seem to come to any less wrong conclusions than anyone else, many times - they just come to those conclusions much more quickly.For me it's just been a thing where I've discovered my limitations, probably much later than most people do - in fact that high IQ might have retarded my progress in finding my limits - and now I'm coming to understand the way in which, as I once saw it put somewhere, "I make myself my enemy."