The smartest people in the room often overlook this critical attribute for success

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The following excerpt is from Jennifer Cohen's book, Bigger, Better, Bolder: Live the Life You Want, Not the Life You Get. Buy it now on Amazon, | Barnes & Noble | Books-A-Million | Indiebound | Target | Walmart.

"You've been told a lie all your life. You've been told being brilliant will make you successful. I tell you the world doesn't favor the bright; it favors the bold."

Those are bold words, given that I had the audacity to say them in front of a room full of some of the smartest people on the planet - a group of students, professors and administrators from MIT. It was November 2021, and I had been invited by the organizers of MIT's annual FAIL! Inspiring Resilience talk to talk about how I overcame failure, and how they can too.

Why did MIT invite me? It turns out that some of their smartest students "fail at failure" - with serious emotional and mental health consequences - and, luckily, failure is one of my greatest skills. Or should I say, developing the resilience to overcome failure is one of my greatest strengths. As I told the audience that day, "I may have a masters in failure, but I have a doctorate in recovery."

Image credit: Edmund Prieto

When you've always been at the top of your class, always lauded for being straight, no one is surprised to hear that you've been accepted into a prestigious school. In fact, it is planned. Your parents are proud, your teachers are satisfied and your friends are so jaded because of course you have been accepted into a top university. You should have won a Nobel Prize for your high school science project, for God's sake! they all think. At some point, being the smartest kid in the class becomes your identity.

There was a kid like that in my high school (I'll call him Pete). He sailed through to graduation, probably smarter than many of our professors. While Pete crushed it without trying, I had to work my ass off just to get a solid C in some classes. Nothing came easy to me, as I said, so I learned to be resourceful in other ways. I developed courage and resilience when I didn't get the grades I had worked so hard for, and learned to let go of the shame I felt at being sent home. teacher-resource for tutoring. And throughout, I honed my tenacity and drive to succeed, if only to prove to everyone, including myself, that failure didn't mean I was a failure. But quitting would have made me a quitter. Pete never had to learn to cope with being scrappy or fail without collapsing. His ability to seemingly slip through school and take success for granted likely dulled his resilience. Where I was constantly looking for ways to compensate for my weaknesses to succeed, Pete and bright kids like him never learned to persevere after failing.

When it comes to getting what you want in life, it's better to be bold than brilliant. That's not to say smart people don't succeed. Or that there are no smart people who are also very daring. But most of us aren't smart at Pete's level. However, we can all learn to be bold at Jennifer's level.

When brilliant kids like Pete are accepted into a school like MIT, it means that for the first time, their classmates, roommates, and friends are all brilliant too. Some are even brighter. Suddenly the Petes aren't the smartest kids in the room anymore. The same Petes who used to take pride in solving a difficult puzzle or math problem their "average" classmates were struggling with now find themselves faced with problems that aren't so simple. They become the struggling Jennifers, only without the resilience and well-honed skills to...