Growing up, I often thought that IQ was some sort of golden measure of intelligence. I used to think that life’s riches and successes followed the IQ distribution, when in reality, things are a bit more bimodal.

Richard Feynman famously said that he scored a 125 on an IQ test growing up. Compared to his peers, ie von Neumann and Fermi, he was probably a standard deviation or two below. In fact, Feynman himself was acutely aware of this, stating many times that he was nowhere near the raw intelligence that his peers had. So what made Feynman so smart?

In statistics, we use distributions to model data points. The bimodal distribution is a common and simple one: it basically looks like a capital ‘U’. As someone who believes in data and its power to express truisms, I think that intelligence follows a similar distribution. In fact, being on one end or the other is likely better than being somewhere in the middle.

It’s really cool to meet someone who can tell you what day of the week you were born based on your birthday, and it was probably really cool to meet von Neumann. No doubt.

It’s also really cool to meet someone on the other end, perhaps even at an IQ that’s a few standard deviations below the mean, because that person doesn’t worry themselves with IQ. That person worries themselves with working hard and proving to the world that raw intelligence doesn’t matter. I think that intelligence often flows into these people as opposed to flowing out, and that’s a beautiful thing.