Transcript

Imagine two people who score exactly the same on an IQ test at the age of 20. Now, fast forward 30 years, and one has become a top performer in their field, while the other has fallen far behind. Well, over my more than 13 years as a peer-reviewed scholar and educator, I've come to understand the reasons for such radically different results. In this video, I'm going to

overview the book Contemporary Intellectual Assessment, a textbook that most people never even encounter unless they attend advanced graduate studies at Harvard or other elite institutions.

I'll break down one of the book's most powerful frameworks—one that explains exactly how the most intelligent people in the world actually build their minds. So let's start with the first piece of this framework: what is called intelligence as process, because it's the engine for everything else. You see, when that 20-year-old takes that IQ test, what's mostly being measured is precisely this intelligence as process aspects such as raw reasoning ability, working memory, and the capacity to manipulate abstract information quickly. But here's the first uncomfortable truth: this kind of intelligence peaks in late adolescence and then slowly declines for the rest of your life.