self-discipline

Is your financial success more a function of your IQ? Or something else?

From an article in Inc. Magazine by Jeff Hayden:

Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman likes to ask people how great a role innate intelligence plays in financial success. Like how much the difference between my income and yours, for example, is based on our relative IQs.

Most people say about 25 percent. Some go as high as 50 percent. (For a long time, I would gave guessed even more.)

But Heckman's research reveals something else entirely. Innate intelligence plays, at best, a 1 to 2 percent role in a child's future success.

Instead, financial success is correlated with conscientiousness: Self-discipline, perseverance, and diligence. [emphasis ours]

Agency & "Failure to Launch"

…kids sprawled out on the floor or couch, their facial expressions blank; attempts to engage them are met with only vague recognition that a conversation is taking place. Even their physical bearing seems to have been altered during these times—normally alert and engaged, they now seem tired, listless, enervated. —Senator Ben Sasse on the effects of technology and video games on youngsters.