Smart people can make terrible decisions.
On highly intelligent people making disastrous choices in their personal lives, relationships, or businesses.
Welcome to issue #054 of Unsubscribe. Each week, I send one essay to help you step off the default path and build a life you love, supported by work you enjoy.
If you’ve ever spent time with smart people, they’ll convince you that they’re right about everything. That, in most cases, they make great decisions based on available logic. The smarter they are, the better decisions they make.
Doesn’t seem like a big stretch, right?
But recently, I’ve taken stock of some very smart friends who have made seemingly disastrous choices in their personal lives, relationships, or businesses.
And I started to wonder...does intelligence often work against good judgment?
The more I look around, the more this seems to play out.
Friends who stayed in toxic relationships that, to concerned outsiders, seemed so obviously bad. Or invested in sketchy deals covered in red flags. Or made huge career moves based on their ego instead of evidence.
If you give these folks an IQ test, they’ll score like geniuses.
So why does this happen?
I think people believe their intelligence in one arena translates seamlessly to another. That their brain power gives them immunity from stupid mistakes.
The engineer who thinks he’s an expert on nutrition.
The surgeon who believes she’s a world-class investor.
The finance exec who’s sure he understands politics better than anyone.
So when they see a clear red flag, they think, “I’m smart enough to handle this.”
But it’s not just intelligence translating from one domain to another.
Smart people also love to overcomplicate the simple. They’ll create these elaborate justifications for a bad choice because “this is obviously a bad idea” feels like they’re missing something. There must be something more intricate or complicated at play.
But most good decisions are boring and obvious.
And if I flip this whole argument, I often see the opposite. The people I know who consistently make the best life decisions aren’t necessarily the highest-IQ friends in my circle.
They’re people of above-average intelligence who have strong instincts, who listen to their gut, and who don’t feel the need to “outsmart” the situation.
They see a red flag and say things like, “That’s obviously a scam.” They don’t need some big, elaborate analysis. And they don’t go down a path of “well, if I factor in these seven variables...” They just say no, and the deal is done.
Smart people can’t (or simply don’t) do that as often. If they walk away from something without fully understanding it, that feels like intellectual failure to them.
So they stay, analyze, and build some mental framework that explains why this terrible situation might actually be fine.
And they’re convincing. Not just to themselves, but to everyone around them. They’ll explain their bad decision so articulately that you start to doubt your own instincts. You go in thinking “this is clearly wrong,” and leave thinking “maybe I’m the one missing something.” I know that’s happened to me more often than I’d like to admit.
And that’s the real trap. Intelligence doesn’t just help smart people fool themselves. It helps them fool everyone else, too. Which means fewer people challenge them, they get corrected less, and the bad decisions pile up.
It pays to remember that sometimes the obvious answer is the right one. Even for smart people.
Especially for smart people.
Have you seen this same thing in your experience? When have you watched a highly intelligent person make a terrible decision that was painfully obvious to others?
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you know why this happens?
because highly intelligent people often over-index on their intellect and override their emotional, somatic, and intuitive signals. logic is powerful...but it’s veryyyyy incomplete on its own.
when you’re disconnected from the body, you can rationalize almost anything, including decisions that don’t actually feel right. the body is constantly giving feedback, but most people just aren’t trained to listen.
i made this mistake for years. learning to integrate intelligence with embodiment changed everything for me.
I agree with Melody's comment about ego. In my industry (different than Tim's), I see the same thing among high-performing people. They think their expertise in one particular area makes them equally proficient across the board. I think the faulty thinking is mainly driven by an out-of-balance ego. (I believe we all have an ego, and the challenge is to keep it in perspective, not to eliminate it.)
I think it is also appropriate to point out that making terrible decisions is hardly the purview of highly intelligent people, I see many, many other people, regardless of IQ, also making terrible decisions about how to conduct their lives. To the degree that ego is at play in all of this, it would seem that ego often overrules intelligence!