181 | THE INTELLIGENCE TRAP: WHY SMART PEOPLE STRUGGLE WITH PRODUCTIVITY [1]

Carter Ferguson
6 hours ago
8 min read

THIS EPISODE IS SPONSORED BY JAMES MCCREADIE & DEBBIE MAY

Being intelligent doesn’t automatically make you effective. Isaiah Hankel

In the last show, GETTING STUFF DONE WITH HIGH IMPACT ACTIONS, I talked about why finishing things becomes harder as life fills up with responsibility, distraction, fatigue, and competing demands. And about how momentum only returns when focus becomes deliberate again.

Today I want to stay with that, but dig a little deeper - in fact here and there throughout this season you are going to notice connections you may never have considered before. In this instance, there’s a particular pattern I keep seeing in creative people who are bright, capable, experienced, and switched on.

And that pattern is this.

Very often, their intelligence isn’t helping them move forward.

It’s getting in the way.

This episode and the next are inspired by Isaiah Hankel’s book The Science of Intelligent Achievement. I love this book. It’s well-thumbed as my books go and Hankel says a lot of stuff that backs up my own thoughts and feelings on productivity matters.

The book looks at why intelligent, capable people often struggle to convert thinking into consistent execution, and he gives that pattern a name, the intelligence trap. I’m not here to summarise the book, but it really is one I return to again and again when I am seeking inspiration or clarity of thought.

There’s a deeply held assumption that intelligence should make productivity easier. That if you’re articulate, perceptive, and good at understanding complex systems, execution should naturally follow.

In practice, though, that doesn’t reliably play out.

Intelligence gives you options. It gives you considered thought. It allows you to see complexity, trade-offs, risks, and unintended consequences. And while those are valuable traits, they also create hesitation.

If you’re smart, you can always justify delay.

You can refine the idea.
Improve the plan.
Research one more angle.
Wait until conditions feel right.
And because all of that sounds responsible, the stall that is in process is hard to recognise.

That’s the intelligence trap.

This is not about laziness. It’s not about lack of ambition. It’s about capability turning inward instead of forward.

Isaiah Hankel would say that the problem isn’t intelligence itself.

The problem is when thinking becomes a substitute for action.

Understanding a problem is not the same as advancing it.

Analysis feels productive, but on its own it does not create momentum.

Over time, the gap between what you know and what you’ve actually produced becomes uncomfortable.

That gap erodes confidence.

You start to doubt yourself, not because you lack ability, but because your output no longer reflects it. This is where frustration sets in, especially for people who are used to competence.

This episode is built around six principles that explain how intelligence, when unmanaged, works against productivity, and what needs to change for it to work in your favour again.

Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not. Cal Newport

PRINCIPLE ONE - YOUR MENTAL ENERGY IS FINITE

Isiah Hankel points out that mental energy is our most valuable asset. More valuable than time. More valuable than effort. Because without available mental energy, intelligence, experience, and skill don’t translate into action. You can know exactly what to do and still be unable to do it if that resource has already been depleted.

Attention is finite. When focus breaks down, it’s rarely because someone is weak. It’s because the demands placed on their mental energy exceed what the brain can sustain.

Where this becomes problematic is that most people treat mental energy as if it’s infinite. They assume it will always be there. That it can be stretched, pushed, or overridden with willpower. Hankel argues the opposite. Mental energy is limited, it drains faster than we expect, and once it’s gone, productivity collapses regardless of how capable you are.

It takes me back to last week’s episode and the fact that as we get older or our lives become more filled with everyday noise, and our mental energy is sapped away at every turn. I find this more and more difficult in today’s world because of things like enshittification that I brought up in the New Year Special. The systems that used to help us are now turned against us with the sole purpose of extracting our time, our energy and our finances. It has gotten so bad that I now avoid even doing things like opening emails until I have to, as I know they will suck the life out of me, literally and figuratively.

I also avoid, despite knowing the necessity of making the call, phone calls to things like insurance companies. You time a call to an insurance sales line as opposed to a call to an insurance claims line, and you will see what I mean. The exponential difficulty of dealing with difficult companies burns the mental energy directly from my psyche.

Highly intelligent people often internalise this rapid loss of mental energy due to the friction of modern living or whatever it is that’s burning us out. They assume the problem is them. In most cases, it isn’t. It’s structural. Too much input. Too many decisions. Too much noise pulling from the same finite resource.

That’s why protecting mental energy matters more than trying to squeeze more hours out of the day. Every unnecessary decision, every interruption, every piece of noise taxes the same system you rely on to think clearly and act decisively. When that system is overloaded, focus breaks down not because of a lack of discipline, but because the resource itself has been spent.

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. David Allen

This is, in many ways, the first place intelligence turns against you. You assume the problem is you, rather than the conditions that you’re working under.

PRINCIPLE TWO - BUSYNESS IS SOPHISTICATED AVOIDANCE

Another way the intelligence trap shows up is through busyness. And this often follows directly on from depleted mental energy.

When you’re thinking feels strained or scattered, intelligence looks for relief. It looks for tasks that feel manageable, contained, and resolvable. Things with clear edges. Clear starts. Clear finishes.

Emails get answered. Systems get tweaked. Research expands. Planning continues. The day fills up, and from the outside it looks responsible.

But motion is not progress.

Intelligence has a strong bias toward order. We want to tidy things up. We want to reduce uncertainty. We want to feel on top of things. Busyness scratches that itch. It gives a sense of control at a time when deeper work feels harder to access.

The problem is that this sense of order is almost always temporary.

You can spend an hour crafting the perfect email. Thoughtful. Clear. Comprehensive.

You hit send, feel a small sense of completion, and then two minutes later a reply comes back and its two words long or another question you need to take more time to answer. And suddenly the thing you thought you’d finished is right back on the table.

Nothing has moved forward.

That’s what makes busyness such an effective trap. It feels like work. It looks like work. It even exhausts you like work. But it often avoids the one task that actually advances the project.

Busyness is avoidance in a smarter suit. And intelligent people are particularly vulnerable to it because they can always find something useful-sounding to do instead of the thing that really matters.

The key is not to prioritise what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. Stephen Covey

Busyness keeps you just busy enough to avoid the stuff that matters. Do you recognise that in yourself?

PRINCIPLE THREE - FRAGMENTATION DESTROYS HIGH-VALUE THINKING

The work that creates real value requires uninterrupted thinking time. Proper thinking time. Not scraps between interruptions. Not half-attention while notifications are firing.

When thinking time is fragmented, quality erodes. Effort stays high, but output becomes thinner. You feel like you’re working all the time, but nothing has weight. Nothing feels finished. Nothing quite lands.

This is especially destructive for intelligent people, because complex thinking needs continuity. Ideas build on themselves. Judgement improves over time. When that continuity is broken, intelligence gets diluted. You’re still thinking, but never deeply enough for anything meaningful to emerge.

What we call interruptions are really the enemy of deep thought. Herbert Simon

Cal Newport makes a similar point in Deep Work, but from a practical angle. He argues that work which creates real value requires sustained, distraction-free concentration, and that this kind of focus is becoming increasingly rare. Not because people don’t care, but because modern systems are designed to fragment attention by default.

The danger here is subtle. Fragmented work still feels like work. Messages get answered. Tabs get closed. Tasks get ticked off. But the kind of thinking that leads to insight, coherence, or original output never gets enough uninterrupted time to form.

Newport is blunt about the cost of this. When deep thinking time disappears, shallow work expands to fill the space. You stay busy, but the ceiling on the quality of your work drops. Over time, that gap between effort and result becomes demoralising.

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. Cal Newport

This is not about working longer. It’s about protecting thinking time so it can actually function. Without that protection, intelligence doesn’t get the conditions it needs to do its job, and productivity becomes a constant state of motion without momentum.

What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important. Dwight D. Eisenhower

So let’s pull this together.

In this episode, part one of a two part miniseries within season 15, I’ve talked about three things.

First, that YOUR MENTAL ENERGY IS FINITE, and once it’s depleted, intelligence, experience, and effort stop converting into action. Protecting your mental energy should therefor be your number one priority.

Second, that WHEN THAT ENERGY DROPS, INTELLIGENCE OFTEN TURNS TO BUSYNESS. Tidying. Organising. Clearing decks. Work that feels responsible, but avoids the thing that actually matters.

And third, that FRAGMENTATION DESTROYS HIGH-VALUE THINKING. When attention is constantly broken and your work disrupted, quality collapses, even though effort stays high.

Your call to action for this week is:

Don’t try to fix anything yet.

Just notice.

Notice where your mental energy is being drained.
Notice what kind of work expands when focus collapses.
Notice what you default to when deeper thinking feels unavailable.

Because until you can see what’s actually happening, nothing meaningful can change.

Thank you for giving me your time and attention here today. I don’t take that lightly. I know how crowded and noisy things are, that’s why I am doing episodes on this topic in fact, and I really do appreciate you choosing to spend your time here with me. I sincerely hope that you find it useful.

Next week, I’m going to pick this up again and move it forward. We’ll look at the next three principles - why motivation is overrated, why attention is the real bottleneck, and why environment matters more than willpower. In other words, how to start directing your intelligence again, instead of letting it work against you.

I’ll pause here and leave you with these words from Daniel J. Boorstin, who said The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

Now, take control of your own destiny. Keep on shootin’ and join me next time on FILM PRO PRODUCTIVITY!