How intelligent are the highest achieving entrepreneurs, CEOs, politicians, investment bankers, venture capitalists, doctors, and lawyers?

[LecturaLe]

Just curious about how intelligent one must be to be successful.

[GreenEyedTrombonist]

How are you quantifying intelligence?

[GreenEyedTrombonist]

Mostly, I'm just curious how you determine what comprises intelligence.

However, it is important to not equate intelligence with success. Plenty of intelligent people are not successful and plenty of "dumb" people are. There's a pretty good Ted Talk where they looked at successful people and determined the number one factor of success isn't intelligence, education, etc. The number one determining factor is drive. If you are tenacious and keep working towards success, whatever that looks like for you, you are more likely to be successful. Basically, never stop pushing to improve yourself and your output.

[lemma]

To put it like this: it is statistically more competitive to get into a top investment banking analyst program than to get into a top PhD program. 

Once you're in the door though, it's a different set of skills. I know many professors who wouldn't pass probation in investment banking, and know plenty of investment bankers who would drive themselves crazy by the end of a semester of concentrated research. 

[spectastic]

success has a lot more to do with one's emotional intelligence than anything else. an investment banker can be the best math geek out of mit, but he/she's going to hit a ceiling eventually, limiting constraint being the ability to deal with people's emotions, understanding the self, what motivates the self, what motivates others, etc. the CEO doesn't make 270x more than the average employee because he/she has 270x more computing power. These positions are obtained through social interactions. as you may have heard repeatedly, and likely will continue to hear in the future (a lot), it's less about what you know or what you say, but more about who you know and how you say it. 

[lemma]

The general gist of the above is spot on but investment banking is literally elementary school math. The GPAs you need to end up at a top three firm are higher than to get into a top five PhD in most fields, but that type of brainpower doesn't come into any of the work. 

Hard work is more what makes you successful, and attention to detail. It's not intellectual work. Try picking typos at 2am when you've only gotten four hours sleep the night before, and you'll appreciate that it's a different flavor of difficult.