You’re smart. Maybe too smart for your own good.
You built a company, decoded markets, led people smarter than you, and made your way into rooms you once only dreamed of. You’re used to knowing things – and preparing yourself thoroughly before you enter a room.
But when you start chasing the impossible (anything beyond what you currently think is possible) – when you step into the domain where no map exists, no playbook works, and no past can predict the future – your intelligence suddenly stops helping you.
In fact, it might start working against you. Here are 5 reasons why:
1. The Trap of Knowing Too Much
Most founders were raised on a diet of certainty: know the facts, plan the steps, solve the problem. Intelligence thrives on clarity. It needs rules, data, models, frameworks, and feedback loops.
But the impossible—creating what’s never been done before—lives in the exact opposite environment: fog, chaos, ambiguity, and doubt.
When you step into the unknown, your intelligence can’t help you beyond a certain extent because it’s designed to answer known questions. It cannot find answers to things you don’t even know you don’t know.
And no matter who you are or what your achievements or resources are, what you do not know will always be larger than what you do know.
That’s what I call the Intelligence Trap. You start applying logic to what doesn’t make sense in the first place. You analyse and strategise when the answers lie in listening and discovering. You plan when the answer might lie in asking better questions and staying still until the right answer arises by itself (like an idea you get while walking your dog or while taking a shower).
2. When Intelligence Becomes a Ceiling
The same intelligence that built your success can become the gatekeeper of your next level of success. What got you here won’t get you there. Your intelligence whispers, “Plan, prepare, prove it, be certain.” But the impossible can’t be created with certainty.
You can’t think your way into a miracle. You can only commit your way into it.
When you go after a goal that defies reason—when you compress time, disrupt an industry, or reinvent what’s possible—you’re no longer in the realm of problem-solving. You’ve entered the realm of creation – from scratch. You are not improving on what exists – you are starting from a blank canvas and imagining not planning. That is creation.
And creation doesn’t come from logic. It comes from presence, inspiration, surrender, and trust.
3. The Unknown Has Its Own Language
The unknown doesn’t speak in data. It speaks in intuition, instinct, and insight.
It’s what happens when you move faster than your brain can rationalize, when you make decisions before they make sense.
That’s why the most visionary founders sound insane at first. They are operating beyond analysis. They listen and tune into a signal the intelligent mind can’t detect – you can call it intuition or the universe speaking to you.
The trick is not to abandon your intelligence, but to know when to choose it and when to ignore it. Let it serve you but not run you. That is wisdom.
Because the greater the unknown you enter, the less your intelligence knows what to do. It’s like trying to use a compass on Mars—it spins beautifully, but it points nowhere. (Mars has a very weak, highly spatially variable magnetic field, unlike Earth)
4. Beyond IQ: Enter WQ (Wisdom Quotient)
- IQ helps you build systems.
- EQ helps you build people & teams.
- WQ helps you build realities that don’t yet exist.
WQ is the combination of pattern recognition, trust, paradox, and action without proof. It’s knowing that the next step reveals itself only after you take the current one. When you stop waiting for certainty, the unknown starts to respond and move.
At 10GenPartners, I see this every week:
You don’t get to “figure out” the impossible. You have to become the person who moves towards the future will full certainty without ever needing to “figure it out”. You have to become the person willing to be wrong rather than always wanting to be right with your intelligence. (and your brain doesn’t like being wrong – hence the resistance)
When you can, you move from predicting the future to creating it. And that shift demands something intelligence alone can’t deliver: faith, surrender, and the courage to move without evidence or certainty – but with complete conviction and commitment.