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How do we define smart and successful? Having kids in school, I am focusing a lot on that phase of life and how successful people are there. Schools are not really set up for a gifted child. It’s really designed to move at the average student’s pace. So smart kids tend to be bored and not challenged until probably high school. As a result, those gifted kids tend not to develop very good study habits which then hurt them when they need to study. However, since they were doing well for years, good discipline around learning was ignored by the adults around them. This is why you see around the 7th or 8th grade a marked decline in grades with these kids. And I hear from parents being confused why it is happening. Then there is just the awareness factor. There have been studies done of kids who studied and didn’t study for a test. The kids that didn’t study felt they did pretty good on the test and felt very confident in themselves. While the kids who did study felt they didn’t do well and had a lot of self-doubt. The kids who felt they did well, wrote everything they knew so they felt they put everything there was to know, on the test. While the kids who felt they did bad, knew there were things they didn’t know and therefore felt they could have done better if they just had more of that information, they know they were not aware of. They are smart and self-aware and aware of the world around them and so know the pitfalls more than the non-studied counterparts. The thing is, the kids who felt they did well, didn’t do well at all. While the kids who felt they didn’t do well, actually outperformed the other group, consistently. Feeling smart and being smart are not the same. Why does this matter? In the world of business, especially around hiring, people hire based on feeling, not knowledge. Think about the world of data and analytics. Hiring is really being done by the group who thinks they did well on the test but didn’t. Because often they miss the whole point and they end up hiring someone who doesn’t actually know how to do data and analytics leadership or they tie their hands and make the job an IC role. Meanwhile the person who knows what they are doing collects and unemployment check because the hiring team didn’t study.