Lewis Terman's Expectations Of Success

A study done in the early 20th century by psychologist, Lewis Terman, took kids with the highest IQ scores across America and placed them in a group called the Termites. This group of individuals were considered to be the “best of the best” and were fully expected to have great success in their careers and even take on some of the top positions in their field’s. However, to Terman’s surprise, these were, in fact, not necessarily the results. Though many of the Termites would go on to have good jobs and find success in their lives, they were unable to live up to Terman’s expectations of becoming America’s elite, as Malcolm Gladwell wrote on page 89 of Outliers, “But few geniuses were nationally known figures. They tended to earn good incomes--but not that good. The majority had careers that …show more content…
Nor were there any Nobel Prize winners in his exhaustively selected group of geniuses.” I agree with Malcolm Gladwell that there are many more factors that have an affect on success than just IQ and that an individual only has to be smart enough in order to achieve great things. This is a point that needs emphasizing since so many people believe that the smarter someone is, the more successful they are going to be.
So what does this mean? Does an individual’s IQ really matter that much in terms of how successful they become? Gladwell writes on page 79 of Outliers, “The relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn’t seem to