If you are a professional, or what economists like to call a “knowledge worker”, your mind drives your career.

That includes not only the contents of your mind (knowledge & skills), but also how effectively your brain processes data (IQ), as well as how your mind functions day to day (mental state).

We all know how important knowledge and skills are when it comes to getting high-value jobs, and that’s why I’m not even going to discuss it. Just read a job description and pay attention to the emphasis given to “what you know” or “what you can do”, and you’ll get the picture.

Of course, just like knowledge and skills, IQ is also an undisputed driver of success. In fact, we have seen through numerous studies that IQ is strongly linked with positive career outcomes and wealth. 

I like how Jay Zagorsky of Ohio State University in Columbus expresses it: “Each point increase in IQ test scores is associated with $202 to $616 more income per year”. This means, all other factors being equal, someone with a score of 130 (top 2%) will earn about $12,000 more per year than someone with an IQ score of about 100 (average).

While equity focused social scientists try to run away from this fact and interpret these results through narratives that appear to obscure reality; we have no agenda other than maximizing the career success of our students and members. In that context, we recognize that IQ is important in creating a high-value career, and that makes discussions of IQ is extremely contentious. (People hate genetic determinism, and with good historical reasons. People also hate the idea that they may have no control over their social mobility).

Regardless of how people feel, IQ is so important and so contentious that it is literally illegal to administer IQ tests while hiring someone. Employers try to get around this through credentialism or alternative forms of aptitude testing that function as a proxy for IQ. Sure, if an employer gave you a straight up IQ test, it would be considered discriminatory and you could likely sue them. But if as a hiring manager, you sat down with applicants and went through an exercise like pair programming, measuring the speed at which they are capable of coding (mostly a function of IQ), you’d be considered a savvy hiring manager.

All that being said, we still find…

IQ Research is Extremely Problematic!

First of all, $12,000 is a tiny sum of money. It’s practically negligible, because it’s the kind of bump you can get to an average salary using some of our most novice negotiation techniques. It’s chump change.

Second, when it comes to career success, IQ, or the ability to pattern match and process data through your brain efficiently and effectively, captures only a tiny piece of the puzzle. 

You see… Knowledge, skills, IQ – these are like the raw materials you NEED to build your ideal life. But they are only that, raw materials. They are potential.

In order to actually achieve this, you have to follow a blueprint and put all the raw materials together in the right way, over a period of days, weeks or even months, until you achieve your vision. 

It doesn’t matter how much of an expert you are, how amazing your work is, or how intelligent you are, if you cannot put these to use in an environment where the market responds to you, you’re guaranteed to lose.

This means, you not only need to be plugged into the right network, but you also have to interact with your network in a way that creates opportunities.

And what determines how we embed ourselves within networks? Of course there are many factors, but the top factor is what we call our Career Imprint.

Here’s What Tops Skills, Education and IQ

All of us have a set of beliefs, habits, preconceptions, and feelings that determine how we behave, how we interact with other people, and how we get perceived in the context of our career. These make up what’s called our Career Imprint. It’s called an imprint, because it is imprinted in our mind through our social, cultural and parental conditioning – for most people, the career imprint is done to them and not something they have any control over.

The Career Imprint is a crucial component of our mind which determines how we project our self-image. It determines how people feel about ourselves and respond to others. A high-value career imprint, naturally leads to behaviors that makes people feel like they are getting value interacting with us. A low-value career imprint makes them feel like you are being a value leech, and avoid you.

It works this way because, as social animals, humans have an intrinsic need for social order and a hard-wired urge to know our place in the world. Our career imprint helps with that, functioning as our “operating system” that helps us navigate the hierarchies we are embedded in.

In other words, our career imprint not only determines how people treat us, but it also determines how we treat ourselves and what we treat ourselves to.

For instance, people with high-value career imprints will gravitate toward managerial and executive roles, present themselves as confident experts, take risks and be looked up to. Whereas people with low-value career imprints will tend to avoid attention, avoid conflict, avoid risk-taking and feel more comfortable serving rather than being served. They naturally seek to be invisible and be left alone.

(Sidenote: the observant reader might say that a high value career imprint sounds a lot like extroversion, and it does have some elements of extroverted behavior, but this is misleading. Extroversion is not about extroverted action, which can be trained and triggered through a variety of means, but about whether or not extroverted action is depleting or rejuvenating. A high-value career imprint, or a low value one for that matter, can operate in people with any Big 5 configuration, and is NOT a personality trait. A Career Imprint is fundamentally a deep rooted subconscious belief system and a set of conditioned, reflexive social behaviors).

Of course, it should go without saying that these differences are meaningless and reflect nothing about the intrinsic value of a human being. People of all walks of life should be treated with equal dignity and respect – in an ideal world. But… In the real world, when it comes to your career – the career imprint separates winners and losers. 

Unfortunately, as hinted above, this imprint is stamped in our brain when we are brought up, primarily influenced by our parents and early teachers. And unless we go through the process of recreating it, it sticks with us, determining our mental and personality limitations. 

Remember: your career imprint is not how you think about yourself or see yourself. It is a subconscious and embodied phenomena. It is the career persona you exude, and how other people see you. It relates to what people call “executive presence”, in the sense that executive presence is an aspect of a high-value career imprint such as “entitlement to decision” or “strategic thinking”.

If you’ve studied the curriculum of prominent business schools such as Harvard Business School or Stanford’s MBA program, you’ll see that they talk a lot about concepts like “executive presence” or “strategic thinking” as crucial aspects of career success, while at the same time, admit that they don’t know how exactly to teach it!

Of course, it’s not that they don’t know how to teach it. They do! It’s just that teaching it takes a politically incorrect route. And it requires rewiring of your personality toward a competitive, inequitable frame that the current cultural paradigm pretends to reject.

In other words, teaching a high-value career imprint is not the kind of thing a mainstream institution can do… But then again, we are not mainstream and we will never be mainstream.

In our experience, the 30 Day Career Imprint Challenge generates great results. It’s a useful tool for our ambitious professionals who aren’t afraid to dive deep into their mind, change their career imprint according to their own vision, and gain control of their future.

If you don’t want to be defined by your circumstances, and pick your own path rather than have it be picked for you by your family background or the personalities of your teachers, you need to go through this experience. It is the only one of its kind, going through the challenge is free, and will always remain free, but you have to figure out how to apply to it, and you can only try the challenge once.

Make it count!