15 Common Mistakes That Keep Intelligent People Poor

You know, 70% of individuals with IQ’s above 130 never accumulate meaningful wealth despite having every intellectual advantage. People much dumber than you are living the life that you wish you lived. And you resent them for it, don’t you? You say they must have done something illegal or immoral because it makes you feel better about yourself.

And just the thought that that might not be the case fills you with existential dread. Deep down, you think that life isn’t fair. Everyone said you’ll do great things. You were one of the smartest in school. So how come people who are thought of as average or even losers are kicking your ass at the most important test? The only intelligence test is if you get what you want in life.

You never bothered to learn the rules of the game of life. So here are 15 reasons why smart people stay poor.

They don’t do the things that make other people rich.

Smart people optimize life by trying to not be poor instead of trying to be rich. So, they never pursue opportunities that build wealth. They can tell you all the reasons why you’ll lose money investing in the stock market, in Bitcoin, in real estate, in your own business, not realizing those are actually the vehicles building wealth for everyone else but them. You can explain compound interest but earn none of it. To get rich in life, you need to do the things that make other people rich.

Life rewards action, not know how. There are graveyards filled with high IQ people who died resentful because they never did anything with their lives. Sounding smart in conversation has little to no correlation to your bank account. The main reason why smart people stay poor because they’re afraid of other smart people judging them.

They think they’re smarter than they are.

Look, we’re going to shatter the cornerstone piece you built your entire identity on. Okay, you are not that smart. If you’re that smart, why aren’t you happy? If you’re that smart, why aren’t you rich? If you’re that smart, why aren’t you surrounded by love? It’s because you confuse intellect with your ability to figure life out.

Everyone who want to win in life, you have to win across five pillars: money, health, relationships, emotion, and intellect. It doesn’t matter if you maximize just one. They’re interconnected. If one is missing, your whole life falls apart because its effects will bleed into other areas.

A lot of declarative knowledge but little procedural knowledge.

Knowing how to solve a problem and being able to solve a problem are two very different things. You can’t get a six-pack by reading about crunches. You confuse I could if I wanted with actually doing it. And the older you get, the more you realize that life isn’t a question of ability, but a question of who does it.

You can define entrepreneurship, but you haven’t sold anything. You can explain leadership theory, but nobody would follow you into a parking lot. You lack proof of ability. The truth is, getting rich requires you making mistakes. Being wrong, failing, and getting mud on your clothes, all the things that smart people prefer to avoid.

They’re bitter and angry because it wasn’t handed to them.

Look, school messed this up for you. And it’s not even your fault. When you put your hand up, spoke the right answer, and got praise from your teacher, it reinforced this idea that in order to get a gold star, all you have to do is say the right thing.

Everyone told you you’re smart, and somehow you came to believe that it’s enough. You got used to approval as fuel. You got used to being ahead. Then you entered a world that doesn’t care about your potential, only your output. Now you say dumb things like, “There shouldn’t be any billionaires. All rich people are corrupt. All rich people got lucky. All rich people exploit others for profit.” Bitterness is just entitlement with a better vocabulary. And entitlement never built anything of value.

They go for prestige over profits.

Because you suck at the game of wealth, you try to change the game to one of status. So you pursue diplomas, titles, and rubbing the institution’s reputation on yourself as if the color of the cage negates the lack of freedom. You brainwashed yourself into seeing asking for money as selling out, sales as manipulation, and wanting money as morally suspicious. The trap here is thinking that these two perspectives cannot coexist.

The pinnacle of human existence is self-actualization. Working hard, contributing more than you take, and living a life worth remembering. Pursuing these as your core tenants leads to both prestige and profits. The main reason why smart people get trapped is because their values are misaligned with what the world expects in return for a great life. You spend your money on things that don’t bring financial returns. You actually read books, just the wrong ones.

They overanalyze every opportunity until it’s gone.

They delay investing until they’ve done more research. And the more research you do, the more you realize how little you actually know, and that fear of failure just builds up.

The thing is, the market is always shifting. Since nobody is as special as they think they are, other people will have the same idea as you, usually around the same time. The one who gets it in the hands of the consumers first learns way more than the one locked in a room. You can’t steer a parked car. Okay, but smart people will argue all day about the best route while never leaving the driveway. Not to mention that there is a real skill issue at play here.

They spend decades perfecting skills the market stopped paying for.

A common mistake that smart people make is thinking the market cares about how much effort goes into something. The truth is though, all it cares about is outcome.

If you can get the same outcome with a tenth of the effort and half the price, you’re going to be rich. You’re not going to like hearing this, but there is no nobility in more effort. New tools are constantly being released allowing you to do just that. Smart people feel smart because they’ve learned a decade ago to use the depreciated tool or software or programming language that nobody uses anymore, but the market has moved on.

They say things like, “I’ve invested too much into this field. It would be a waste to change now.” Or, “I’m too advanced to start over.” But solving problems is always getting cheaper, and to get rich, you need to solve expensive problems. According to the World Economic Forum, approximately 39% of highlevel skills will require significant realignment in the next 5 years if they want to remain economically viable. Not to mention that they’re poor judges of their own time.

They solve $10 problems with $100 worth of time.

You know, intelligent people tend to undervalue their time. There’s even a word for it, cognitive effort bias. They undervalue time because they overvalue the feeling of figuring something out for themselves.

They waste the whole day proving someone wrong. They waste the whole day fixing something that will need to be fixed again next week instead of just replacing it. And we agree there is a certain romance in perfecting the insignificant in doing it yourself. But romance rarely pays dividends. Ask yourself right now, how much is an hour of your labor worth? From this day forward, you will not do tasks that go under said threshold.

Despite their bigger brains, they make a common mistake. Just because something is hard to get or takes a long time doesn’t mean it’s valuable. Sometimes it’s just hard to get. The mind loves friction. The wealthy love leverage. Can I solve it and should I solve it? Require different kinds of intelligence. And if they do try to solve it, they usually overengineer it.

They believe complexity equals value when actually clients pay for clarity.

If you want to instantly identify the smartest broke person in a room, listen for how unnecessarily complicated their explanations are. There was this old joke, okay? When it was time to send humans to space, NASA spent $150 million perfecting a pen that could write without problems in zero gravity.

The Chinese used a pencil. Smart people overengineer everything they touch. You’ll be surprised just how many of life’s problems can be solved with duct tape and faith. That’s the mistake. The job isn’t to waste your life conquering the problem, but to overcome it and move forward in life.

No fancy language, no unnecessary fluff for your little edge case. People will pay for clarity and getting it done. Anything else and you’ll shoot yourself in the foot. Money comes from sales and from removing friction. Simple offerings outperform complex ones by up to 120% in customer acquisition and loyalty. Get out of your head and get on with your life.

They believe they already know everything, so there’s no point in asking for help.

Arrogance is what’s keeping you poor. If you know everything, why aren’t you rich? You’re too proud. The fear of not knowing something and sounding like an idiot is genuinely keeping you poor. While you’re lost out there in the middle of the jungle trying to figure out constellations, people with lower IQs just ask the first person they see which way is the nearest village.

That’s what asking for help or advice does. People who receive coaching and mentorship experience dramatically higher income growth and career acceleration than those who go solo. They network horizontally with other experts like themselves instead of vertically with decision makers who could move the needle in your favor. Smart people hate not being the smartest person in the room while entrepreneurs seek that out purposefully.

They look down on soft skills.

You know, very often they see themselves as introverts, not knowing that it’s a skill issue, not something you’re stuck with. As most things in life, you learn how to do it right. To some people, it comes easier. Some have a little bit more work to do.

And that’s just where pride comes in. Again, the world isn’t a meritocracy. It’s a communication. Smart people love hard metrics, but it’s hard to measure things like confidence, charisma, leadership, storytelling, sales, negotiation, or emotional intelligence. And because you suck at it, you call them fake skills while completely ignoring the fact that according to the World Economic Forum, eight of the 10 highest paying competencies on Earth are soft skills. AI brought down the cost of intelligence to pennies. So soft skills get the bag.

They double down on sunk costs.

The smartest people waste years defending decisions they made in minutes. The smarter you are, the better you are at justifying your bad decisions. Smart people stay in careers they hate, industries that are dying, businesses that aren’t working, degrees they regret, ventures that drain them, relationships that stunt them.

Not because they’re working, but because they once invested time, money, or reputation into them, and they have the belief that maybe things will turn around even when it’s not under their control. They wear it with bravado and call it loyalty, but objectively it comes at the expense of your paycheck and lifelong freedom.

A man will stay aboard a sinking ship not because he hopes to stay dry, but because he built that ship himself. So stop trying to rationalize something that’s not working. Let go and move on.

They romanticize artisan craftsmanship, but the market wants mass scale.

Smart people love the right way. Perfect technique, perfect mastery, perfect execution. But the marketplace rewards availability, speed, and scale. Just look at the real world. We romanticize things that are handmade, but almost everything you regularly spend money on is industrial by design. Small batch goods have labor costs that are 5 to 15 times higher and therefore cannot compete with mass production pricing. This is the mistake they make. Okay.

Wharton research found that businesses which focus on early scalability outperform highly specialized craft first operations by up to 12x over a 10-year horizon. That’s why over 70% of global consumer spending is captured by companies that operate at scale.

They marry or partner up with another intellectual and double that analysis paralysis.

When two risk averse PhDs partner up, the household becomes a university, not a factory. And it’s important to remember that universities survive through donations. The household has many hypotheses, but zero outcomes because their hesitations often marry as well. You end up confirming each other’s fears and cancelling out action, which in turn leads to slower major life decisions holding you back.

According to Harvard Business School, it takes them 2.3 times longer to make a decision than everyone else. And you need to take risks early in your life if you want to build wealth. Households that invest aggressively before age 35 have four to seven times more wealth by the age of 55. Instead of building a life, you build a library of reasons not to.

They believe the myth that great work speaks for itself.

If your work could speak for itself, it would have spoken by now. Nobody knows you exist and the world is noisy. Many men will fade into obscurity waiting for the world to notice. You’ll die smart, broke, and resentful. The quiet mouse that doesn’t get fed. If you’re blessed with higher intellect, you might as well use it to mold the rules of the game to your benefit.

Your smart brain will come up with solutions, and your business brain will trade them with the masses. Our mantra is you can get anything you want in life, but let’s get you rich first. Once we rid ourselves of money problems and have access to any tool we desire, then life really opens up. Please keep this a secret.