If you get far enough into this video series (video 3), you will hear this dialogue:
Interviewer: "Say you had the opportunity to run the world. How would you do it?"
Langan: "Well one of the first things that I would do is I would institute something like the Manhattan project for a safe long-lasting means of birth control. Simply implant that in all children at age 10. That would solve our population problem right off the bat and it would also enable us to practice a benign form of eugenics. Or I should probably say anti-dysgenics. Prevent undesirable mutations in the human genome. People who wanted to have children would apply to make sure they had no disease. Either we have to do it through genetic engineering or we have to let only the fit breed. We like to think that it is our right to breed as incontinently as we want to... have as many kids as we want with whomever we want to. Future generations of mankind are being saddled with the results of what we do or don't do. Freedom is not necessarily a right. It is a priviledge that we have to earn. A lot of people abuse their freedom and that is something that people have to be trained not to do."
He goes on to say that he'd be happy to train people... just put him in charge.
Further, IQ does not equal intelligence in my view. I actually think it does a good job of testing certain abilities, but it leaves out a number of very important ones, such as creativity, which I think most people believe is probably the most important ability. There are cases where a stroke in a certain area of the frontal cortex increases IQ by 15 or more points in some patients. Clearly, it cannot be measuring all mental ability accurately when severe damage can increase your score. Some people who are born with only half a brain (only a left or right hemisphere) or with an organic disease, such as autism, perform conspicuously well at certain tasks that we associate with intelligence. They sometimes have phenomenal memories, can perform mind-blowing math skills, or can calendar count (see these videos; Daniel Tammet, Stephen Wiltshire ). These are amazing abilities, but I think they also demonstrate how powerful a normal brain can be. It may be that our definition of intelligence needs to be rethought.
If you could measure someone's determination, creativity and persistence, then I'd think you'd be on to something.
Sure, you have to be smart to be a good entrepreneur, but with persistence you get smart-- and you get smart in the right places. By persistence, I don't mean stiffly reapplying your efforts to the same tasks and problems over and over. I mean rethinking the problem, coming at it from different angles, and trying new things until you get it right. The brain is highly plastic and adapts a lot more than you may have been led to believe. Norman Doidge has written a great book on this subject of neuroplasticity called The Brain That Changes Itself (the first few chapters it read like an infomercial for Fast Forward, but it's good after that).
How your brain actually changes
Our focus on intelligence in entrepreneurship probably arises from the belief that technology start-ups founders are typically very smart-- which is true. So, the smarter you are the more likely you are to develop a better product and be successful. After all, smarter people receive more Nobel Prizes and invent more innovative products.
Right? Well, no. Once you get above a certain IQ (around 125-130) there is no correlation at all. It turns out that what you need to receive a Nobel Prize, cure a disease, or invent a great product is sufficient understanding of the field and a lot of imagination, not pure virtuosity. It is also the case that what we consider to be inborn talents, such as playing the piano and math, are correlated very highly with the amount of time that you practice them. In fact, there is even a number-- 10,000 hours-- under which, purportedly, there are no cases in the world of expert ability in any field. This was true even for Mozart who I think most people assume was given the innate ability to compose music with virtually no practice. It isn't true. Sure, he was born with a lot more ability than almost everybody else, but he had to hone his ability like anybody else would.
If you are skeptical of these claims, then you should read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell argues that the year and even month that you were born are, in many cases, critical factors in success. His basic point is that, although genetics and personal environment do play a huge role in what we're capable of doing, our actual success also depends on a lot of factors that are out of our control-- such as the year in which we were born. One example is that a grossly disproportionate number of Canadian hockey players are born in January, February, and March and almost none are born in December. Another is that Bill Gates, Bill Joy, Steve Jobs and a number of other famous software entrepreneurs were all born within 6-12 months of each other. I'll let you find out why in the book.
Gladwell's book is a case study for the entrepreneur to learn how to catch the zeitgeist. If you've gotten this far in a post this dry, then I'm convinced that you have the intelligence and persistence necessary to be a great entrepreneur. I think the most effective thing you can do is think about how you can use your current skills and existing technologies to solve new types of problems that aren't being addressed. Relax. Take something you're interested in and have a talent for and play around with it.
How can you put together things that already exist in a new way to solve a problem that people may not even recognize as a problem?
