Is Intelligence Enough

You’ve got to be smart so succeed in life. You have to study hard and be open to different ideas. You have to be intelligent enough to recognize opportunities and take advantage of them. But is high intelligence enough to be very successful? Scientists from the University of Adelaide and the University of Bristol say that non-cognitive skills are also important.

Of course being smart is very important. You are more likely to be successful if you are smart and you know what you’re doing. Success in life is quite difficult to measure, but in academic world it is usually reflected in grades.

Scientists decided to see how non-cognitive skills, such as attention, self-regulation, and perseverance, affect academic achievements. They reviewed the entire literature on effects of non-cognitive skills in children aged 12 or under and found tentative evidence that non-cognitive skills are associated with academic achievement. This is quite interesting, because no studies have looked for correlation between academic achievement and non-cognitive skills before.