I want to believe that my perhaps above average IQ won't matter and I could be in a league of PhDs. But practically it seems very difficult and there is a glass ceiling which seems too difficult to break. A feeling that there is something which my mind cannot probably grasp.
If you're smart enough to get a bachelors or masters in a subject, you're smart enough to get a PhD in the subject. What will make or break you is your tenacity and willpower and not giving up when it becomes a dull hard slog.
And realistically the difference in quality/difficulty level of work people do to get their PhD is massive. Some people revolutionize their field for decades to come and some do a slightly more drawn out bachelors level thesis. Yet they both end up with the same degree.
It's all about learning more things, which in turn expands what you could possibly think - the human mind's ideas are limited to what it already knows or has experienced.
Learning new things expands that, allowing you to make new and unique connections between ideas.
Knowing more will help your future learning too - many ideas from separate fields are similar. Once you have learned one, your brain can easily learn the other ones, as it just maps the concept.
Many people have said it's about perseverance, My take on that is that it is perseverance in learning. I don't know what the IQ fuss is about. It's about as useless as all the other categorisations such as the Myers Briggs Personality Types.
Don't let yourself be categorised by a made up number, based on the ideas of the 1900s that have nowadays been mostly proven wrong or, at the very least, unreliable at best.
Learning and doing will break any glass ceilings you may think there are. The people who are at the top of their fields got there by years of excruciatingly hard work that is often forgotten. (forgotten not as in that it didn't matter, but as in people looking at them often think they just became top of their fields in a fortnight, and forget their actual life's journey that led them there)
