Actually, yes. Yes, it can hurt, because several of the "tips" that you'd expect to help you are actually messing you up. It turns out you're not a success because you do things like ...

We all want to be successful, but things like tyrannical bosses, stapler-stealing co-workers and the statistical impossibility of every single person being a CEO keep bringing us down. So we try to balance the scales by following the advice of self-help books or motivational guides -- sure, a lot of those things are probably bullshit, but it can't hurt to give them a try, right?

5 Being Too Smart Makes You Crack Under Pressure

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Most of us would say that the only surefire way to achieve success (short of, you know, busting your ass for several years and making the most of your opportunities) is by being smarter than everyone else. Yet the real world doesn't seem to bear this out. How many of you have a boss who seems to be a moron and is also way more successful than you? Well, there's a scientific explanation for why smarter people can end up stuck in dead-end jobs. Basically, it's because they're more likely to screw up under pressure.

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The safest thing to do when in danger is to be too stupid to know you are in danger.

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When you're smart, your brain works differently than everyone else. Smart people have higher working memory capacity to work with, either because they trained it or they were born with it. This higher working-memory allows them to excel, but studies have found that it also causes them to screw up more often than the rest of us.

Researchers recruited participants and divided them into two groups: the high working memory crowd (HWM) and the low working memory doofuses (LWM). They gave them a math test and to nobody's surprise at all (except a few of the LWM guys), the HWM group scored significantly higher.

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"If you'll turn to page 514 of our findings, you'll find that we're almost positive that smart people are smarter."

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But performing a task for work or school is very different than doing it in a lab -- there's a lot more pressure in a real world scenario, so they changed the conditions. They told both groups that they'd have another math test, but this time their high performance would earn them cash and their results were going to be examined by math professors. The results of that next test? The score of the HWM guys dipped so badly that they had become just as horrible as the scores of the LWM, while the LWM crowd scored just about the same. The stress brought on by the extra incentives didn't affect the stupid guys at all, while the HWM were pissing in their boots.