High intelligence opens doors, but it does not guarantee you’ll walk through them. Past a certain threshold, being “smarter” stops predicting who thrives.
What separates the successful from the merely brilliant is often practical intelligence: reading situations, negotiating, persisting, and knowing how to ask for what you need. Those skills look like personality, but they are learned.
Family and class shape that learning. Children raised around confident adults absorb a sense of entitlement to speak up, question authority, and treat institutions as negotiable.
Meanwhile, equally gifted kids without that training can behave like guests in their own lives—polite, cautious, and easy to overlook. Intelligence becomes private rather than effective. The world rewards not only what you can understand, but what you can translate into action with other people in the room.