In the history of modern psychology, there is a famous experiment that can be described as dark humor.

In 1921, the eminent Stanford psychologist Terman aimed to prove that high intelligence creates geniuses, selecting 160k children in California through auditions, ultimately choosing 1,528 prodigies with IQ scores in the top 1% for lifelong tracking.
35 years later, the data provided a highly dramatic answer.
Among these 1,528 certified geniuses, not a single Nobel Prize or Pulitzer Prize winner was born, nor did they produce any groundbreaking work that changed the course of the world.
Most of them lived as successful middle-class individuals in the secular sense: doctors, lawyers, high-paid engineers, with comfortable lives, but certainly not world-changing geniuses.
And the most ironic detail is: two boys who were eliminated early in the audition stage by Terman for not meeting IQ standards.
One was called Shockley, who later co-invented the transistor and helped create today’s Silicon Valley;
The other was Alvarez, who later proposed the asteroid impact theory for the extinction of dinosaurs.
These two children, deemed unqualified by IQ tests, both went on to win Nobel Prizes in Physics.
This psychological tracking, the longest in human history, ultimately slapped its creator in the face.
The data revealed a cruel truth: even among the smartest people, who can reach the top is almost never decided by the score that beat others at that time.
Beneath the data, what truly makes a difference are things that tests cannot measure: astonishing perseverance, a savage thirst for knowledge, and the ability to persist when a task becomes boring and extremely torturous.
Children who can read the same obscure thick book six times in a row, those who can spend 30 years obsessively working on the same equation—on IQ tests that measure short-term memory and pattern recognition—are most likely just ordinary people.
The standards you use to filter will inevitably select for certain traits.
Metrics that can be easily quantified are almost never the real decisive cards.
Unfortunately, even today, most people, when recruiting talent, planning careers, or even in competitive parenting, are still desperately eliminating true geniuses to cater to a certain exam score.