Many decisions in life are fairly straight forward. You’re leaving for work and your neighbor’s car is stuck in snow. You put your car in park, help push the car out of the snowdrift and proceed to work. However, there are many times in life when decision-making has a vital impact on how your life will unfold. In such cases, highly intelligent people usually move from emotional into rational mode. This means that they envision various scenarios and then consider the short and long-term consequences of each branch in the decision tree. For example, a young person entering college who has to choose a major might be prompted to choose a program they can easily master. A highly intelligent individual would more likely ask, “What kind of career do I want to pursue and which program would best serve this objective?” If a course in philosophy is of interest to them, but has no value to their career, they might enrol in the program that serves their long-term interest and merely monitor the philosophy course in their free time.
One of the most important personal qualities required for highly intelligent decision-making is the ability to postpone immediate gratification for long term gain. This is vital in managing financial resources. Most people buy impulsively to satisfy immediate wants. The highly intelligent person is more likely to defer impulsive purchases and make investment their top priority. Building wealth is like making a snowman. You start by rolling a small ball of snow into a slightly bigger ball and continue the process until the ball is so big, that one roll picks up huge amounts of snow. This process applied to finances is called compound growth. Like the snowball, it grows slowly at first and eventually becomes so large that it earns more money than you could earn from your labor. Many highly intelligent people (and some of lesser intelligence) know this and retire early to a life of leisure. One of the secrets of effective decision-making is the realization that we all have a child inside us that has never-ending wants. We have to quiet that inner child and put the rational adult in charge.
Of course, there are also decisions that do require emotional considerations. A good friend whom you know to be conscientious and reliable has missed a car payment and needs a loan. An old adage advises against lending a friend money and asserts that you will end up losing your money and your friend. This is generally wise advice, but you search your memory for instances of this person’s behavior and you determine they are highly likely to repay the loan, so you decide to provide them with the funds. So decisions can be made on an emotional base, but only after some rational thought. Highly intelligent people make the better decisions most of the time, but we all know some highly intelligent people whose lives have been destroyed by poor decisions and some people of average intelligence whose instincts have served them well. Good decision-making is correlated to intelligence but the correlation may be somewhere between moderate and strong.
