Mensa international is the largest, oldest and best known society of people with High IQ. It inducts people with standard IQ tests (like Stanford-Binet) and if you score above 98 percentile (i.e. you are amongst the top 2% people), you qualify for joining Mensa.
About 6 and a half years back, I tried the test and I failed. I had just completed my graduation with IIT Kharagpur, joined Interra and had generally done well. I was more than confident that I would be able to qualify. But fortunately or unfortunately I didn't.
It helped me realize that I am not really as intelligent as I used to think I am. The only other thing I could do was hard work. This has helped over the last 6 years and I have been able to do reasonably well in my career. I have learnt a lot and done quite good things so far. Probably it was good that I failed in that test.
Oh and since then I have consistently avoided appearing in any kind of tests :) I don't like them. May be I am afraid :)
2 comments:
There are an infinite number of skills/qualities/whatever that one can have which will contribute to his achievements/happiness more. In my opinion, namely, in no specific order:
1. Vision
2. Ambition and attitude
3. Ability to get the bigger picture
4. Altruism
5. Individuality and Originality
Mensa skills elitist bull shit.
Maybe its about being sought after as a remarkable human being.
To do that one must first inquire into what it is to be a human being.
Talent is overrated. As you correctly point out, deliberate practice is great. But the best moment to study is when the opportunity for deliberate practice with feedback is available. This is the case for example at a university.
The growth available through self teaching is limited - the global neural net called Self gets recursively expressed through growth itself and hence blind spots of the Self get compounded with growth.
Growth available therefore with a deliberate and intentional community focussing on a common goal with good will toward each other, is the only optimum solution for the opportunity of true happiness to be available to all. Why? Consider the equivalent circuit of the the global distributed neural net comprised of individual brains (each node represents an identity, a single persons global neural net, or perhaps its activity at a given moment?) at each node. The link between any two nodes at any constant time t are representational of the state of communication and its content between those two nodes. Each node is always linked to each other node. There Always is a constant background communication, for example, as a function of say some bias, there is an unverbalised communication present. Ufff, why to explain all this? For time pass. Hopefully the whole distributed net will interrupt itself and start with a new resolve one day... maybe we should conduct a global event where everyone on New Year's all over the world gets on to the streets under open sky for the same five minutes and point their thumbs vertically upward and laugh, that will increase the happiness available over time to the human race (and its economy) exponentially with the duration of the interruption.
Good will to all,
Anselm
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