Mensa

Am I the only one who thinks that membership in Mensa is rarely a good thing?

In case you are not aware, Mensa is an organization of really smart folk.  In order to join you have to have an IQ of 130 or so.  In other words, you have to be in the top 98^th percentile of human intelligence.  But that’s the only requirement.  You have to score high on a test.  There is no requirement for having accomplished anything of greater significance than that. 

Or more plainly, there is no requirement for having accomplished anything.

I can’t imagine joining Mensa.  I used to dream about it as a child.  I wanted some way to prove to others that I was brilliant in spite of what they thought.  I wanted to point to my membership and say, “You were wrong about me.”  But invariably my imaginings would go on to the wonderful things I had also done aside from being in the group.

Over time I’ve changed my thinking on this.

In my life I have heard a small number of people boast of being in Mensa, usually it’s someone on some reality TV game show.  Whether they did well in the game is beside the point.  The point is I hadn’t heard of them prior to the show and I never heard of them after.

For me, membership in Mensa is like a giant sign saying, “Here is someone who should be crushing it in life.  He should have accomplished everything because, after all, he’s a genius.”  (I use the masculine pronoun here because I’m a guy.  It could just as well be a woman.)  I wouldn’t want to join such a group until I had accomplished something to prove I deserved it.  Something beyond the IQ test.  But then, if I had accomplished said thing, I don’t think I would feel the need to have a Mensa membership to validate me.

If you are in Mensa and you haven’t done something so awesome that most people would say, “Hey that’s genius,” then you’ve really wasted your time.  But that’s just my opinion.  And I confess that it did not take me a lot of effort to make it.