Best Advice: Tell Me Your GQ (Guts Quotient), Not Your IQ

By Toby Cosgrove, MD

I was a high school junior. I thought I was pretty smart. Then I came face to face with Charles Keller. He was a chairman of the history department and director of admissions at Williams College. Keller had reviewed tens of thousands of college applications in his career. He’d helped develop the SAT test. Keller looked at me, then looked at my parents and said something I’ll never forget:

“Don’t tell me his IQ,” he said. “Tell me his GQ. What’s his ‘guts quotient?’”

Time has shown me the wisdom of Charles Keller’s unusual metric. Character is indeed destiny, and being smart isn’t enough. You need “guts.” You need to be able to try and fail and try again to succeed. You need to be able to face down the naysayers and push ahead with what you know is right. Even if you find out later you were wrong. “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new,” said Albert Einstein.

Martin Luther King, Jr., faced incredible odds in the struggle for civil rights. For him, guts was “taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

Persistence, determination are key.

Guts is a form of faith. It’s believing that what you are doing is right and worthwhile and will have a positive outcome; even when there are indications that success is far from guaranteed. The history of medicine is replete with examples of gutsy pioneers who persisted in the face of disparagement and sometimes ridicule from the great intellects of their day. I had the privilege of knowing Drs. F. Mason Sones and Rene Favaloro, the Cleveland Clinic cardiologist and surgeon who developed coronary artery bypass surgery. Brilliant as they were, these two physicians achieved their breakthroughs mainly through determination, hard work, and late nights of study and planning. Dr. Favaloro later wrote of Dr. Sones, “He is a man who fights for his principles but suffers with his patients. More than once, we would go downstairs after an operation to share our defeat, and I would see tears running down his face.”

It’s not failing — it’s discovering.

Displays of conspicuous intelligence come and go, but the work of Drs. Sones and Favaloro continues to relieve pain and enhance lives. Persistent effort yields persistent results. “I haven’t failed,” Thomas Edison once said. “I’ve discovered 10,000 things that don’t work.”

Charles Keller’s long-ago remark to this high school junior wasn’t strictly advice, but it taught me a lesson. Individuals should not be measured by their test scores, but by how they respond to the tests of life.