SUCCESSFUL INTELLIGENCE: How Practical and Creative Intelligence Determines Success in Life

From one of the nation's foremost intelligence experts comes a far-ranging book that is destined to have a profound influence on the way we think about aptitude and intelligence. In Successful Intelligence, the award-winning scientist and Yale professor Robert J. Sternberg argues that the best predictors of success in the real world are creative and practical intelligence. Using original research conducted over decades, Sternberg shows why these specific mental skills (and not the academic thinking measured by IQ tests) are the key to achieving life's most important goals, whether in business, the professions, the arts, or other areas of endeavor.
Successful intelligence, Sternberg maintains, differs from IQ (which involves academic achievement) or emotional intelligence (which involves the sort of thinking most relevant to personal relationships). It requires ability with three kinds of thinking: creative, practical, and analytic. People who possess successful intelligence are "smart" at achieving: they know how to make the most of what they do well and how to find ways to work around their limitations. Motivated, controlled, persevering, and independent, these are the people who know how to get ahead. And most heartening of all, Sternberg reveals, successful intelligence is measurable and can be developed.
Filled with practical examples of the kinds of thinking skills that bring about action-oriented goals, Successful Intelligence is a book for everyone concerned with what it takes to get ahead - employers, parents, teachers, and especially all those who want to maximize their strengths and succeed.

Robert J. Sternberg is now IBM Professor of Psychology and Education in the Department of Psychology at Yale University.