Most people will die after three days without water. But drinking too much can be equally dangerous – water intoxication is deadly, and during rigorous training about a dozen soldiers per year are hospitalized for drinking too much water.
Mae West said, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.” That might be true for some things – health, happiness, golden retrievers, maybe.
But in so many cases the thing that helps you can be taken to a dangerous level. And since it’s a “good thing,” not an obvious threat, its danger creeps into your life unnoticed.
Take intelligence. I’m talking about book intelligence, the kind that shows up in SAT scores and GPAs.
How could someone possibly be too intelligent? How do you get to a point where you realize you could have been more successful if you had been a little dumber?
A few big ways:
1. Very smart people can fool themselves with elaborate stories about why something happened.
Comedian Robin Williams was a terrible student. During a macroeconomic class at College of Marin, Williams’ final paper contained a single sentence to his professor: “I really don’t know, sir.”
He failed the test, but it’s the right answer to most economic problems.
There is so much that we not only don’t know, but can’t know, about why complex systems like the stock market and economy behave the way they do, because human emotions and shifting social preferences can’t be distilled down to a formula. Humility is a superpower that prevents overconfidence.
But being very smart makes it harder to harness that humility. You want to put your big brain to work, and your mental horsepower allows you to create complex stories and elaborate models of cause and effect. Worse, if you believe that complexity equals intelligence
