I read this and thought: spot on. Smart enough to do well in life but not be isolated through rarefied levels of intelligence, or excessively burdened by awareness of the world's troubles, probably makes for a happy individual.
My issue is with the phrasing. There's no such concept as "30% smarter than average", because there are no (known) intelligence units that could increase by 30%. Intelligence is measured relative to other people; we don't have any cardinal numbers for it. As such, saying "30% smarter than average" makes exactly as much sense as saying "fg wnthmsz ijwklwe uagp whajqlx".
My apologies. I conveyed the meaning as best as I could, those who 'felt' the concept where able to forgive the obvious inaccuracies inherent in any statement such as that.
Also there is an average IQ (though a poor metric). The average is 100, a 30% increase would be approximately 133 points.
"Intelligence tests are one of the most popular types of psychological tests in use today. On the majority of modern IQ tests, the average (or mean) score is set at 100 with a standard deviation of 15 so that scores conform to a normal distribution curve. This means that 68 percent of scores fall within one standard deviation of the mean (that is, between 85 and 115), and 95 percent of scores fall within two standard deviations (between 70 and 130)."
Therefore, roughly speaking - what I proposed is that being in the top 5% can be either a blessing or (more easily) a serious impediment to a happy life.
As phrased, this is completely meaningless. What are you thinking of here? You think people are best off at the 80th percentile?