Intelligence isn’t equal to development; intelligence has to be developed. Just because you’re smart doesn’t automatically make you a perfect or even brilliant human being. Intelligence is a potential, a capacity, and that capacity need to be developed in order to do you or anyone else any good. You might have a high IQ, but if you never learned to read or write you’d never be able to pen that novel. And if no one ever taught you math, you’d never be able to solve those equations. Education of one kind or another is how we commonly develop the potential of intelligence; education is a tool for developing us along the way to reaching our highest potential.
There are multiple types of intelligence, of course; however, IQ, the basic cognitive firepower for many developmental activities, is likely necessary (but not sufficient) for the development of many of the other intelligences. Education and training can help develop all the types.
Additionally, attention (the capacity to maintain selective, sustained concentration) and how we use it has a lot to do with hoe we develop across the various intelligences. Improving my attention has helped me enhance my learning and growth in many areas of my life, regardless of how developed they were or weren’t. I think of meditation, working on my attention, as a supercharger for my intelligence and education. There are plenty of studies out there describing the genius of meditation, but for me, it’s the fine-tuning of how deeply I can learn and develop that makes a major impact on my life.
Want to be a better date, a better lover, a better friend? Meditate. It’ll focus you, and you’ll thereby be able to better work on your verbal, logical, musical, visual, kinesthetic, inter- and interpersonal, naturalistic and existential intelligences. Who doesn’t like an evolved man?