Successful Intelligence: how practical and creative intelligence determine success in life
by Robert J. Sternberg (NY: Penguin Putnam, 1997)
Throughout my life I have been interested in intelligence, mine and that of others. From early years at Taft School where I was regularly described as a “gross underachiever” to later in my work life when I began to understand that “smarts” came in all shapes and sizes, intelligence has been an interesting issue. Who has it and how can you figure out what kind each person has?
Successful Intelligence (SI) presents an interesting addition to my own practical knowledge of intelligence and a further jumping-off point from Howard Gardner’s efforts in Frames of Mind: the theory of multiple intelligences.
The preface gives away the whole story. Let me quote a bit:
| “Successful intelligence is the kind of intelligence used to achieve important goals. People who succeed, whether by their own standards or by other people’s, are those who have managed to acquire, develop, and apply a full range of intellectual skills, rather than merely relying on the inert intelligence that schools so value. These individuals may or may not succeed on conventional test, but they have something in common that is much more important than high test scores. They know their strengths; they know their weaknesses. They capitalize on their strengths; they compensate for or correct their weaknesses. That’s it.” (bold in text) (p. 12) |
So, this is quite an invigorating start! Intelligence is something we use in day-to-day life.
The first half of SI takes up a review and critique of traditional efforts to define and measure human intelligence. For those of us who followed the uproar over The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994) or have otherwise been exposed to critiques of standard approaches to intelligence, skip quickly to Part III “Successful Intelligence Is What Counts”.
SI posits three key elements of successful intelligence:
- analytical
- creative, and
- practical intelligence