Counterpoint on IQ

IQ clearly is correlated with success in almost every area of life you want (not drumming, though). 

However, that does not mean that (like anything else) a higher IQ is always better.  It may be that a moderately high IQ is even better for success than a super-high IQ.  Eric Falkenstein wrote (as usual, very intelligently) a bit about this recently.  Also, there is some evidence that suggests that peoples' abilities to understand others max out somewhere around 30IQ points of difference (can't find link).  I have personally held the theory that personal estimation of others' intelligences is limited to (a very self-biased) 5-point scale.  A given other person is: Dumb, Not quite as smart as me, About as smart as me, A little smarter than me, Much smarter. 

To calibrate.  Folks who are just barely mensa-qualified are kinda able to understand the average person.  Folks in the 140 range simply don't.  Their mental model of a normal person is 100% unreliable.  When you reach IQs in the 160+ range, they have a hard time understanding folks who are ONLY mensa-qualified, and their perspectives on normal people may as well be fairy tales.  Indeed, as Falkenstein points out...these people are just weird.  Mid-high IQ folks (125-ish) are better than super-high IQ folks (160+) in a lot of cases, because at least they are less captured by their own ideas. 

To elaborate, there is a theory that IQ permits people to substitute GPU utilization for normal effective heuristics for getting along in the world while young.  As such, the higher/highest IQ folks often don't learn the normal effective heuristics, and thus get stuck with no real ability to function at all without forebrain processing. Thus they create theories in order to allow them to function.  And like all theories, most of them are wrong.  However, since they're smart people, they provide all sorts of elaborate justifications for why the theory fails in this particular instance, without abandoning the theory.